Spokane-based Inland Northwest Health Services is participating in a new project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that will make the Inland Northwest one of the first sites in the U.S. to use a large-scale health surveillance network as an early-warning system for the spread of disease.


INHS has been named a subcontractor in an $8 million, five-year contract the CDC awarded to San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), says Jac Davies, director of INHSs Northwest TeleHealth and regional outreach. INHS will receive about one-third of that money over the next five years, while the balance will go to SAIC and the University of Washington, which also will be involved in the project, Davies says.


One of the goals of the project is to increase the efficiency of the systems used by hospitals for reporting diseases to public health agencies, she says. The other objective is to increase what the CDC calls situational awareness, which means using data from health-care organizations to monitor public health, in hopes of spotting disease outbreaks sooner.


The goal of situational awareness is to improve health agencies ability to track contagious diseases and to detect disease outbreaks or bioterrorist attacks, she says.


This could be a way to give public health systems an early warning if there was pandemic flu developing in the community, Davies says. The concern is that there might be new emerging diseases that arent being detected because they havent been identified yet.


Under INHSs subcontract, the projects participants will include the state departments of health in Washington and Idaho, the Spokane Regional Health District, and roughly 20 hospitals in Eastern Washington and North Idaho, Davies says. The project is focusing on hospitals in the Inland Northwest that already are part of INHSs data-exchange network, with the hope that eventually tools developed through the project could be applied to other hospitals in the region, she says.


The project here is part of a $38 million initiative the CDC is funding that involves two other projects. The lions share of the funding is going to a project in New York, where public agencies are working with regional health-information exchange organizations similar to INHS to help create a statewide health-information network there. The third project will help augment a health-information network being built in Indiana.


The CDC has done this type of work with individual hospitals, Davies says. Whats new is approaching groups like INHS that have access to data from multiple hospitals and working through that route.


For the project, INHS will employ its extensive health-information computer network, which spans 38 hospitals and health-care facilities across Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, and California, and through which information including laboratory results, imaging, and electronic medical records is shared, Davies says. It will use the part of its network located in this region to collect and transmit data related to public health, such as cases of communicable diseases, she says. SAIC, which has worked with the CDC on other projects, will lend its technical expertise and act as a consultant, she says. The University of Washingtons Center for Public Health Informatics will help public health agencies develop tools they can use to interpret and analyze the data they will receive.


Most states require that health-care providers and hospitals report cases of certain diseases, such as E. coli, to public health agencies, Davies says. Under the current system, they report those cases via phone or written communication, she says. The CDC project aims to create a system that would automate that process.


For instance, if a patient at a Spokane-area hospital were diagnosed with a disease or a condition for which the state requires notification, that information would be added to the persons electronic medical record, where it would be detected and sent electronically in a report to the Washington state Department of Health. That departments system then would automatically send the information along to the health agency in the county where the patient lived, which in that case would be the Spokane Regional Health District, she says.


Were basically automating whats already being done, so that we can make the process more efficient and comprehensive, Davies says.


The situational awareness component of the project involves increasing and improving the distribution of information about non-specific symptoms that might be developing in the population, she says. For instance, hospitals could send data electronically to the state department of health about upper-respiratory problems theyre treating, and the agency could track that data to see if any trends emerge that warrant further investigation, she says. Currently, health-care organizations only are required to report specific diseases, not symptoms, unless they see a lot of patients with similar symptoms in a short period of time, she says.


Torney Smith, administrator at the health district here, says the agency could use that data to understand and evaluate current and potential risks to public health, and inform the community about ways to mitigate those risks.


Its an opportunity to link public health study about disease with clinical data that hospitals possess, Smith says. Its important for us to understand population health dynamics so we can reduce the incidence of disease and provide appropriate education to people to help make their lives healthier.


Davies says INHS is in the early stages of the project and hopes to start signing up hospitals this spring. Its using some of its current staff, as well as SAICs technical staff, and doesnt plan to hire additional people to work on the project, she says.


Contact Emily Proffitt at (509) 344-1265 or via e-mail


at emilyp@spokanejournal.com.