The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is using software from GE Healthcare (United Kingdom) to help track H1N1 and seasonal influenza activity in real-time.
According to the company, the CDC will be able to access reports from GE Healthcare’s Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a repository of anonymous clinical data and best practices. The MQIC, which is populated by data from GE’s Centricity EMR, will provide the CDC with tools to help track clinical symptoms such as fever, nausea and chills, prescriptions written, and vaccination rates, as well as variables such as procedures performed, pregnancy and patient age, within 24 hours of being documented in participating doctors’ offices, it says.
This information, the company claims, will help the CDC better understand the characteristics of H1N1 outbreaks and determine who is most at risk for developing complications from the virus.
