Bioterrorism fighters get ammo

From...

By Dan Verton

WASHINGTON (IDG) -- The U.S. Air Force by the end of this month will complete an $8 million project to create an infectious-disease early warning system that can be used throughout both the public and private health sectors.

Dubbed LEADERS, which is an acronym for Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection & Emergency Response System, the Web-based system is being built under an application service provider model that will allow hospitals and medical authorities to subscribe without having to buy any additional hardware or software. Pricing information was unavailable at deadline.

Through LEADERS, medical personnel will have the ability to track symptom outbreaks as they are reported by hospitals in real time. They will also be able to map geographic regions where outbreaks are occurring and determine response capabilities of various medical facilities.

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"The work we are involved in links directly to early detection of potential bioterrorism, by using electronic medical records [and] advanced medical diagnostics imbedded into our network," said Brig. Gen. Klaus Schafer, the Air Force's assistant surgeon general for medical readiness, science and technology.

"Most hospital systems today are simply inadequate," said Schafer. "They are based on billing and administration, and none really are designed to provide surveillance over a given population." In fact, a recent report by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that only half of the nation's public health offices are even connected to the Internet.

The Defense Department project, which has been in an implementation phase for 18 months, is the result of a partnership between the Air Force, the CDC and several private-sector IT companies. The companies involved include Oracle Corp.; Chantilly, Va.-based EYT (formerly Ernst & Young Technologies), which serves as the ASP; Idaho Technologies Inc. in Salt Lake City, which provides field-deployable biological and chemical detection systems; and ScenPro Inc., a digital mapping company in Richardson, Texas.

Early components of the LEADERS system were deployed in support of hospitals and state medical offices in New York and Phoenix during this year's World Series, when the threat of anthrax attacks had put security officials at large sporting events on a heightened state of alert. In addition, the system was used in New York shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and within 24 hours had linked more than 250 hospitals to real-time symptom tracking.

In such cases, either the CDC makes a determination that medical surveillance is required for a specific location or event, or state or local health departments request the assistance of the CDC. Officials must then come to an agreement on whether LEADERS or another system should be deployed to local hospitals and command centers.

"The idea is to catch the incident as early as possible," said Luke Hannon, vice president of health care consulting at Oracle. "In the case of the postal workers in Washington, D.C., who were exposed to anthrax, instead of using the press [to alert hospitals to the threat], the LEADERS system would have set off an alarm right away."

Only a handful of hospitals now use one or more of the LEADERS components, but the goal is to deploy it to hundreds and potentially thousands of hospitals around the country, said Hannon. Ten hospitals in northern Virginia have deployed various software components of LEADERS in support of 911 ambulance routing, said Schafer.