Sitting The Sick Spots

The next time a natural or man-made biological event occurs in Missouri, the state's health department should be right on top of it. A new statewide biosurveillance system implemented last summer feeds disease data from more than 50 hospitals and private labs to the department, where it can be analyzed and acted upon more efficiently than in the past.

The new statewide system, called HealthSentry and developed by a local software company, is an expansion of a program already in place for a year in the Kansas City area. During that time, the Kansas City health department received 25 percent more infectious disease reports than it had previously. Using money from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--which has been encouraging states to connect data in this way--and a small amount of state funding, the health department has increased the number of hospitals hooked into the system so that it effectively covers the whole state.

This system is an update of the state's old alert system, "which was more manual," explains Nancy Bush, the deputy director of the department's Center for Emergency Response and Terrorism. "We would make phone calls to hospitals and schools a few times a week, gather and analyze that data a few times a week. Now we can do it daily." By having more comprehensive, up-to-date reports all being sent into a single system that charts and graphs health data daily, the real success will be in catching anything peculiar earlier, Bush says.