Medical Informatics

Improving infectious disease/bioterrorism detection

Carle is teaming up with staff at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications to develop an early-warning system for infectious disease and bioterrorism outbreaks.

The project would work like this: Carle will help gather chief-complaint data from participating Region 6 hospitals. The supercomputer will check the data for trends. If it identifies a pattern, such as an abnormal number of “achy muscle” complaints, we would alert public health officials of a potential outbreak…in this case possibly influenza. By catching bioterrorism and infectious diseases early, we have a better chance of containing them.