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Kansas City Implements Electronic Tracking System for Disease Outbreaks

The system automatically gathers information related to disease outbreaks and alerts health-care and emergency personnel to potential outbreaks.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The city's Health Department went live last week with an electronic early-warning system designed to detect natural-disease outbreaks or biological warfare in their earliest stages.

The system, called HealthSentry, automatically collects critical biological information about disease outbreaks from health-care organizations including hospitals, emergency departments, clinics and physician offices. Laboratory tests ordered by doctors and the results of those tests are analyzed by the system, and any unusual number of ordered tests or test results provides early warning of a potential outbreak.

The system alerts public-health officials by pager and e-mail, and public-health or emergency officials can log onto a secure Internet site to investigate cases using reports generated by the system and GIS-based information that shows where the disease is clustered or spreading.

City officials said 90 percent of the information the system receives is from physician offices and emergency-room events at the earliest steps in the health-care process, allowing for a rapid response to possible outbreaks. The remaining 10 percent of the information collected by the system comes from hospital patients.

Last year, officials said, the city was struck with an outbreak of shigella -- an intestinal pathogen -- spread among children at a day-care center. Through the system's electronic reporting, the lag time of previous reporting methods can be reduced from as much as a week to less than 24 hours and can give public safety officials more complete information.

"This network will save lives," said Dr. Rex Archer, director of Kansas City's Health Department. "It's a major leap forward for public health in Kansas City. We can respond more quickly and effectively to natural outbreaks or bio-terrorism events, containing the spread of disease with the early detection HealthSentry delivers."

Archer said the city worked with a Kansas City-based vendor, Cerner, to build the necessary infrastructure and connect local health providers to the network.

Officials said 16 laboratories report information into the HealthSentry system, and another seven will soon be connected to the network. Area health-care organizations participating in the project include Health Midwest, Saint Luke's-Shawnee Mission Health System, the Truman Medical Center and the Providence Medical Center.