Statewide system to warn of disease outbreak unveiled

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- An electronic laboratory reporting system designed to alert health officials to a possible bioterrorism attack or disease outbreak will be implemented statewide, Gov. Bob Holden and other officials said Monday.

The biosurveillance system, called HealthSentry, was created by Cerner Corp. and has been tested in the Kansas City area for a year.

Health care providers participating in the system provide data on tests they have ordered to a centralized system. That data is analyzed every day to detect either a potentially deadly bioterrorism case, such as anthrax, or an unusually large number of tests for infectious diseases, such as hepatitis.

When such events are detected, the system will alert local health care workers, who will coordinate a response.

The system will save precious time for health care workers and residents throughout the state, Holden said.

"Time is the difference between illness occurring and illness prevented," Holden said. "Time can be the difference between lives lost or lives saved."

Twenty-two laboratories in the Kansas City region have participated in the program in the last year. The system has prompted a 25 percent increase in cases reported to the Kansas City Public Health Department, with those reports coming in an average of one day sooner than before, said Rex Archer, director of the health department.

Cerner, which is based in Kansas City, is paying for the first five years of its system in the Kansas City region. It will be expanded statewide with the help of a $1 million grant from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Holden said the new system makes Missouri a leader in responding to bioterrorism or an outbreak of infectious disease. But he added that it is an ongoing challenge, and he hopes for better support from the federal government.

Financial commitment

"There is a lot of effort at the federal level to support homeland security, but so far we're not seeing the commitment in dollars that's supposed to go along with it," he said. "I want to see the federal government not only talk about homeland security, I want to see them put the money behind it."

Neal Patterson, chairman and CEO of Cerner, said the company funded the early test of the system out of concern about bioterrorism raised by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But he echoed Holden's concerns that similar systems need to be implemented nationwide.

"We desperately need to integrate our health delivery system into our national homeland defense and our public health system," he said. "This is a significant step forward (for Missouri). But there's a long way to go and it needs to be done on a national level."

Hospitals are required to report information on some diseases, but the current system can be confusing and time-consuming because health care officials get the information via faxes, telephone or e-mails that may not be relayed for days. And that information often doesn't have patients' addresses or doctors' names, Archer said.

He said infectious diseases are the main cause of death in the world. And he said terrorists may use biological weapons because health officials won't know about the attack until people start showing symptoms -- and by then treatment becomes difficult.

"The first people that become ill help us to know that maybe others have been exposed, and that's where we can save the most lives," he said. "Our ability to hand off to the right jurisdiction to follow the case and get to the doctor to figure out what's going on has increased significantly."

The state hopes to add 50 major health care providers to the system, with initial data coming in by May, said Garland Land, director of the state's Center for Health Information Management and Evaluation. The entire state is expected to be covered by the system by the end of the year.