New iPhone Application Tracks Disease Outbreaks ... Swine Flu

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Colleagues,

As reported in Yahoo News ... Apple iPhone owners wondering if there is a case of swine flu nearby can now find out instantly with a new program that tracks outbreaks of infectious diseases.

"Outbreaks Near Me" is an application for the popular smartphone developed by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston in collaboration with the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The application, which was developed with support from Google.org, the Web giant's philanthropic arm, enables users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases such as swine flu in real time....It is available for free from Apple's iTunes App Store...

ENJOY!

CC

[Carl Taylor]

One of the challenges to biosurveillance for H1N1 is that many of the cases are being seen by physicians in their offices, hence off the grid in terms of hospital centric or public health centric reporting. That is one of the reasons why the numbers published this summer by the CDC were probably only about 10-15% of the actual numbers of cases seen by doctors. In fact most doctors do not submit H1 tests to state labs and have also reported a miss rate of 40% on the rapid A test. Consequently, a physician seeing a room full of patients with similar symptoms is going to write a lot of tamiflu scripts, but probably is not reporting what they are experiencing. So a valid question (assuming we want to know how many cases are out there-and that answer is not necessarily a slam dunk yes) is how do we improve our situational awareness reporting. I suspect some states are flying a bit blind and relying on state lab test data. Others rely on hospital reporting, which is a great way to get started but again misses perhaps as many as 70% of the cases. Enter of course the argument for social media and/or m-health/disaster tools. I must confess I have not found twitter useful for H1, a lot of noise but not enough granularity for our purposes in assisting public health and health care providers. Ushahidi is an outstanding tool and is what I run on my blackberry, but for the moment is not in widespread use outside of emerging nations,nor integrated into our AIMS situational awareness reporting system. The iPhone app certainly can be one of those nearly ubiquitous reporting tools, assuming the data are correct, that there is a reason to collect the data beyond curiosity and that the data ultimately are being shared for purposes of response, planning, decision support, clinical best practices and tracking. The real challenge of course is navigating the territory between the emergent coherence of knowledge based reporters using whatever means at their disposal to share near real time H1 cases and the current situational awareness tools used at the federal, state and local levels.
carl