VCOM View Vol 10 No 1

Monitoring Healthcare Data for Emerging Disease Warning VCOM Medical Students Noticed a Strange Influenza-Like Illness in Data During Clinical Training

T he Edward Via College to log their patient encounters electronically into the College’s CREDO system. The data is used to monitor the students’ training progress, but also used as a source of public health data. The data started to show a strange trend beginning in November 2019, of a higher rate of an unspecified Influenza-like illness. Beginning in January 2020, they saw a spike in the unusual cases at two and a half times more than average. The mystery illness turned out to be COVID-19. “This COVID-19 demonstration confirms that we can use our real- time data to detect future infections or emerging diseases. Since our elctronic system, CREDO, would be of value across the world, from tracking health care student progress to being a medical records system for the third world, we see its potential to change how global health surveillance is done, much improving it,” said Harold “Skip” Garner, PhD, Associate Vice Provost for Research Development. of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) requires students

and documented hundreds of flu cases. However, on this rotation, at the peak of flu season, she noticed people were sick, very sick, yet everyone was testing flu negative. “I did not have a better explanation than the limitation of the test,” said Lieutenant Bruzda. Dr. Bruzda then traveled to Japan for her military anesthesia rotation. Life in Japan was much different compared to the United States— life seemed to come to a halt. Bruzda said it was very eerie, almost an Armageddon feeling. On public transports, masks were required, schools were shutting down throughout the country and the streets of Tokyo were empty. The intercom on the metro played the same message over and over—stressing necessary travel only, encouraging proper social distancing and the importance of wearing a mask and staying home. That is when she began to wonder if those “flu negative” cases could be related to the respiratory illness developing in China? “I cut my Japan rotation short, donned my mask back home and began to investigate it in quarantine. The results were alarming. My paper demonstrates

of syndromic surveillance. The method has proved successful for early warning of seasonal flu, outbreaks including Ebola and Zika and illnesses caused by coronavirus: SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. Syndromic surveillance is most useful for conditions spreading throughout the population, such as acute respiratory illnesses, making COVID-19, an ideal candidate for early detection. “We did not come up with that term, it is generic. We came up with a new way of doing it, but harvesting data we were obtaining anyway and mining it to look for trends that would be indicative of a new infectious disease. We can use this to also track the annual flu season, and identify things like possible hot spots for cancer or other diseases,” said Dr. Garner. Lieutenant Gabrielle A. Bruzda, DO, currently a U.S. Navy Intern Physician, was a fourth-year medical student at the time. She was completing her emergency medicine clinical rotation when she noticed something was amiss. Before she arrived at medical school she worked in the emergency room (ER) as a scribe

The new tool for early detection of disease outbreaks is a form

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