Evaluation of an Early Detection Flu Information System

Influenza (flu) is a contagious respiratory illness caused by flu viruses. The flu is transmitted easily from person to person in seasonal epidemics, and may lead to severe illness, hospitalization, or even death, especially for very young, the elderly, and those with other serious medical conditions. A pandemic with human-transmissible flu can influence medical staff not only heavy burdens but also increased infectious risks. Most importantly, it severely not only affected the allocation of acute care resources but reflected the integration problems between medical resources and epidemic prevention in Taiwan. Currently, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed disease surveillance systems. Due to the various data collection channels of the government units, the lack of integrated application of epidemic prevention applications, the restrictions of data quality and timeliness, a delay in the identification of problems, representativeness of the sample, and difficulty in recognizing clusters of infection, there existed many problems required to be resolved. In our research of the first year (ongoing), the goal was to integrate the clinical data, which can be automatically collected from the three affiliated hospitals of Taipei Medical University, and to extract the relevant variables for prediction of the flu, for building the Early Detection Flu Information System (EDFIS). In the next year of this research, the system evaluation will be conducted. The intended results of this study are shown as follows. 1. To launch the Early Detection Flu Information System in TMU affiliated hospitals. 2. To perform the system evaluation, the results are: (1) System training: to make the use of the historical clinical data as training data set for detection of the flu outbreak. (2) Infection experts meeting: to discuss the results of influenza outbreaks, to collect clinical practice recommendations for meeting appropriate detection sensitivity, and to make functional adjustments of the EDFIS. (3) System education and training. (4) System Verification: to systematically validated the effectiveness of the EPFI and to compare with the open data of flu outbreak-related epidemics of the Taiwan CDC. (5) To publish academic journals (SCI, SSCI or EI).