MCG joins national flu-tracking network

Computers at Medical College of Georgia Hospital and Clinics will soon help public health officials more closely track the flu pandemic. It could be the first fruits of what the Obama administration envisions as an integrated electronic medical record system that links providers and improves care.

The MCG clinical system is one of 550 nationwide working with medical records provider Cerner in its Flu Pandemic Initiative, said Cerner spokeswoman Kelli Christman. That will eventually become 1,100 providers. It includes 30 state public health departments, including Georgia and South Carolina, in addition to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data about flu visits -- with identifying data removed -- is taken directly from electronic medical records several times a day and sent to a central provider in Kansas City, which then forwards it to public health officials.

"That brings to bear a lot of available information to then construct a picture of what is going on in the country in terms of the prevalence of H1N1, where it is, whether it is waxing or waning," said David A. Snyder, the chief quality officer and chief medical informatics officer for MCG Health Inc., which runs the school's clinical system.

The CDC and state health department use a system of sentinel providers in the community who report once a week. For instance, South Carolina uses 87 providers spread across the state, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. That information is forwarded to the CDC, which makes it part of a weekly report called FluView that is always at least a week behind.

"That's the big difference," Dr. Snyder said. "This is real-time information being used for patient care. It is not relying upon any bureaucratic reporting system."

The Cerner system also provides a richer set of data for analysis, said Hal Scott, the vice president of information systems and chief information officer for MCG Health.

"Not only is it done more quickly, I think we can get more different types of information out of our clinical systems than typically we might have been able to do in the past because more complete data is going into those systems now," he said. For instance, it would provide the opportunity to look at the pandemic by patient age or treatment, to compare different regions of the country or even areas of a state, Mr. Scott said.

It could prove more accurate. Instead of relying on claims data or notoriously unreliable rapid tests, the Cerner system could pick up on the symptoms commonly associated with the pandemic illness, Dr. Snyder said.

The Cerner initiative is not intended to replace the sentinel provider system but to augment it and perhaps serve as an example of the power of electronic medical records systems working together, Mr. Scott said.

It could have other applications, Dr. Snyder said.

"It's where we're trying to go with linking up available information systems for positive public benefit," he said. "In this case, it's H1N1. The methodology I think could be used for surveillance of other diseases of public interest."

It could be the first fruits of a "meaningful use" of a network of electronic medical records, something envisioned by the federal stimulus act, which will provide $19 billion to help establish an electronic medical record for everyone by 2014. The act also contains penalties for those not using them by 2015.

The systems have been enormously expensive to implement -- MCG Health has spent between $30 million and $33 million to get its system up and running, Mr. Scott said.

"And we're not done," he said.

He worries that smaller rural facilities can't make that level of investment, so MCG Health is trying to work with its rural affiliates to get there, Mr. Scott said.

"If it is going to work, we're going to have to have information from the people in Sandersville, from the people in Washington, from the people in Swainsboro," he said.

Ultimately, such a network could lead to better quality of care. What the federal government uses to compare hospitals now uses only Medicare patients, and it is often 15 months out of date by the time it is published, Dr. Snyder said.

"We haven't quite gotten to where we have real-time stuff that can give you a real-time idea of what is really going on," he said. "And that is what this is about and it is sort of exciting from that point of view."

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.