Epic to Launch In-System Disease Outbreak Alerts
Epic is set to launch a new disease outbreak alert system directly within its EHR platform. The feature is designed to provide clinicians with timely notifications about emerging infectious threats. The system aims to help providers adjust care protocols and resource allocation in real-time.
- This new capability, part of a toolset called Health Alerts, is powered by Epic's Cosmos database, which contains de-identified data from over 300 million patient records from 1,900 hospitals and 42,000 clinics. The system is designed to flag when diseases like measles or salmonella exceed expected levels within a specific county, providing a granular level of surveillance. - The functionality builds on Epic's previous work during the early COVID-19 pandemic, where it collaborated with the CDC and infectious disease physicians to release rapid software updates to its travel screening questionnaire to help providers identify potential cases. - For an aspiring informaticist, understanding the technical backbone of such a system is crucial; it relies on interoperability standards like HL7 FHIR to aggregate and exchange data between different health systems and public health agencies. The 21st Century Cures Act provides the regulatory framework that mandates this level of data sharing, making it a key policy driver for health IT initiatives. - A significant challenge in implementing any new alert system is overcoming "alert fatigue," a common issue in ICU settings where clinicians can become desensitized due to an excessive number of notifications. A nursing informaticist's role would involve optimizing these workflows to ensure alerts are meaningful and actionable, preventing them from being ignored. - To bridge clinical expertise with IT, pursuing the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Nursing Informatics Certification (NI-BC) is a recognized step. For work within a Memorial Hermann environment, this is often paired with employer-sponsored Epic certifications in specific modules relevant to clinical data and decision support. - The Helios project, a collaboration between HL7, the CDC, and the ONC, is an example of a broader public health effort to accelerate the use of FHIR for data sharing, aiming to streamline how information is passed from EHRs to public health authorities.
