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BOSTON, Feb 14, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Electronic healthcare data, such as U.S. emergency room visits or calls to a nurse, are being automated to detect the outbreak of some diseases.
Martin Kulldorff of the Harvard School of Medicine has developed and operated real-time disease surveillance systems based on electronic records.
In an article published in the medical journal PLoS Medicine, the researches report on a new and flexible approach for early disease outbreak detection.
The method, called the "space time permutation scan statistic," can detect disease outbreaks when only the number of cases is available.
The program, tested in New York City, found four highly unusual clusters of diarrhea cases, three of which heralded citywide gastrointestinal outbreaks due to rotavirus and norovirus. That, researchers said, suggests the method can detect outbreaks early, but isn't prone to false alarms.
The method has been integrated by the New York City Emergency Department. To make the method more widely accessible, it has been implemented as a feature of the freely available SaTScan software found at the Web site satscan.org.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
