Twice during the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, U physician Per Gesteland received an automatic alarm signal through his pager.
Each time he rushed to check his computer data to see if the page meant there had been a disease outbreak or bioterrorist attack. Both times Gesteland knew within minutes the page was a false alarm.
While there was no real public health emergency during the Olympics and Paralympics, the sporting events provided a good test of the computerized Real-Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance system Gesteland monitored.
“If you’ve got a lot of people in the community getting sick at the same time with the same thing, this system will see it,” said Gesteland, who is a National Library of Medicine fellow and graduate student in medical informatics at the U.
The surveillance system automatically collected data on about three-fourths of all patients visiting acute-care facilities in Salt Lake, Summit, Utah, Davis, Weber, Morgan and Wasatch counties.
It tracked the total number of acute-care visits, plus seven symptoms.
Whenever the system’s alarms went off, automated text messages were immediately sent to Gesteland, the system’s developers in Pittsburgh and to Utah’s state epidemiologist, Robert Rolfs, who was stationed at the epidemiological command center at Utah Department of Health headquarters during the Olympics.
Had there been a real disease outbreak or bioweapons attack, the system would have reported to a team of officials who would have decided how to respond.
The system, was just one of many methods used by federal, state and local health officials to monitor for potential health crisis.
Officials also got daily reports of “notifiable diseases” which must be reported by law. They also kept track of patients at Olympic venue clinics and monitored “sentinel sites” like hospitals, pharmacies, poison control centers and other locations where a disease outbreak might first be detected.
However, the system was the only method that could pick up a possible disease outbreak or bioterrorism attack within minutes or hours rather than the next day or weeks later, as is the case with traditional disease surveillance, Gardner said.Gardner hopes the U can attain additional funding to keep it going.