US Testing Bioterror Alerts on PDAs

[LanMan]

@ PIC:

The US Government is testing a system to notify doctors and healthcare providers utilizing PDAs for transmitting urgent information about biological agents. The three-month pilot test is designed to gauge the best ways for federal officials to communicate with front-line clinicians in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=5143

[XCalibur]

... please ... you'll know far more rapidly by CNN then waiting to hotsync when you get back home...

[StatCoder.com]

...please... perhaps there will be a few clinical details relevant to clinicians that isn't covered by CNN.

[Michael Quach]

Excellent idea....

[XCalibur]

PDA Alert!
Brian Vastag


JAMA. 2003;289:1915.

Soon, thousands of physicians will receive an urgent bioterrorism message on their personal digital assistants (PDAs)—but it will only be a test.

A 3-month pilot project from the AHRQ is evaluating a new network for disseminating biological agent alerts. The aim, said officials, is to overcome communications problems uncovered during the 2001 anthrax letter attacks.

Physicians will receive the "doc alert" messages via ePocrates, a commercial PDA network. Each message will provide details of an "outbreak" of disease caused by category A bioagents such as smallpox, as well as key diagnostic and treatment information.

A statement from AHRQ said that the new system will be a front-line supplement to the CDC's existing Health Alert Network, which can broadcast urgent information to 25 000 public health officials across the country via the Internet and a satellite television system.


Seems like it is already on the roll.
HTH

X'

[XCalibur]

Originally posted by StatCoder.com
...please... perhaps there will be a few clinical details relevant to clinicians that isn't covered by CNN.
I wanted to apologize. I guess my reply came out wrong. What I was trying to refer too is the overemphasis that had been put on the subject in the last year or so. (Gotta work on that irony... :D)

This was from the BMJ, and it illustrate well what I was clumsily trying to point out

HAVE MEDICAL JOURNALS HELPED TO JUSTIFY WAR?

(Letter: Medical journals may have had a role in justifying war)
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7393/820

Medical journals may have played an important part in providing the political justification for attacking Iraq, argues a public health expert in this week's BMJ.

Professor Ian Roberts believes that most people in the United States and the United Kingdom would have preferred not to launch a military attack on the people of Iraq. To persuade them to do so, they need to believe that they are being attacked.

Medical journals have (unwittingly) had an important propaganda role in persuading the public that it is being attached, he writes.

To illustrate this point, he compared the number of articles on bioterrorism published in five major medical journals between 1999 and 2002 with the number of articles published on road traffic crashes (which kill about 3,000 people and disable about 30,000 each day worldwide).

Articles on bioterrorism outnumbered articles on road traffic crashes in both 2001 and 2002. Of the 124 articles on bioterrorism, 63% originated in the United States and the rest in the United Kingdom. JAMA published the largest proportion (47%), followed by the BMJ (21%), the Lancet (16%), and the New England Journal of Medicine (15%).

Compared with a health problem that kills 3,000 people per day, the public health importance of bioterrorism has been over emphasised in the leading medical journals, he says.

"I am not implying that this is a deliberate attempt to alarm the population, but nevertheless it may have had this effect. As a result, medical journals may have unwittingly played an important political part in justifying war in Iraq," he concludes.

Contact:

Ian Roberts, Professor of Epidemiology and Public
Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, London, UK
Email: ian.roberts@lshtm.ac.uk

Sorry for the misunderstanding.
X'

[jthompson]

I've been working find ways to disseminate SARS information as the outbreak and our response to it unfolds. The problem is very similar.

I believe that the best solution for this kind of crisis lies in posting authoritative updates on government websites in an HTML format that allows for easy web-clipping to handhelds by whatever software a user chooses to use, and then disseminating that website's URL via email broadcasts. A hospital administrator could set up routine web-clip mechanism and offer the information to staff via HotSync/ActiveSync on the hospital's LAN for those PDA users who would not use web-clipping in their homes or offices (the majority of users). iSiloX would work fine for that, for example, but end-users would have to own iSilo to read the clip.

I do not think that expecting everyone to use ePocrates or any other proprietary platform should be part of the design. Shouldn't the best solution should be platform-independant?

[XCalibur]

Originally posted by jthompson
I do not think that expecting everyone to use ePocrates or any other proprietary platform should be part of the design. Shouldn't the best solution should be platform-independant?
Considering ePocrates is free and that it is widely used (on the Palm OS platform anyway) it is an interesting "test" platform. But I agree that there should be parallel mediums to dissiminate the same information.

Regards

X'

[XCalibur]

Skyscape as released .911
http://www.skyscape.com/911/dot911.htm

Free for download. CDC guidelines for emergencies / bioterrorism

Hope this helps

X'