A group of physicians and technology developers at NorthShore University Health System, based in Evanston, Ill., plan to adapt the system's What's Going Around tool into a mobile app.
The tool, which tracks illness outbreaks in real time based on EHR data from the system's approximately 350 physicians, is available to the public through NorthShore's website. It tracks flu, pertussis, strep throat, gastroenteritis and pediatric asthma by aggregating records that include a diagnosis or symptoms of those five conditions and maps them in patterns across Chicago's northern suburbs, showing trends.
Ari Robicsek, MD, an infectious disease specialist at NorthShore Medical Group, conceived the idea for the tool after seeing that physicians were essentially guessing at trends through their own experiences and guessing which antibiotics would be effective. Communicating about disease trends could help physicians more accurately prescribe antibiotics or antivirals to treat the particular strain of whatever is going around.
"The traditional wisdom is for physicians to learn from their own experience," Dr. Robicsek said in a presentation at Chicago medical innovation hub MATTER. "I would argue that a physician can learn a lot from the experience of other physicians."
The tool's success — about a third of physicians use it regularly and another third use it occasionally, Dr. Robicsek said — spurred the system to develop a mobile app. Eventually, What's Going Around could expand across the state and even further, he said. Because the data it draws from is so simple, including only a diagnosis or code, it would likely comply with any common clinical dataset and work through an HIE, he said.
The group will prioritize the app development before looking to expand outside the state, Dr. Robicsek said.