Real-Time Flu Monitoring System and Decision Informatics

This paper presents a flu monitoring system that utilizes prescriptions-based data. It provides evidence-base information that may be "useful" to many users, e.g., Medical professionals, public health administrators, patients, prescription drugs manufacturers, elementary/middle/high schools. The system consists of a real-time flu surveillance engine and a web based client. The real-time flu surveillance engine consumes E-prescription data feeds in XML format. The analytical engine performs Extraction/Load/Transform (ETL) operations to extract prescriptions, dosage, patient information, and pharmacy location information from the prescriptions, and then, presents a relative flu risk index by zip code. The flu tracking information is published in real-time via geodatabase map application that resides on a Web portal. This flu tracking system differs from available flu tracking systems in three ways: 1) it has real-time updating capability, 2) it incorporates a prediction component, and 3) it integrates the monitoring and predicting capabilities in one system with layers of access right to different users.