The last three major flu pandemics hit in 1918, 1957, and 1968. If our fears come to pass and 2006 turns out to be the year of the avian flu pandemic, it will be the first one in which information technology can help in the fight. Judging from emerging preparation plans, IT will join the fight, but only in a limited way.

The most important components of any flu preparedness plan are the people and resources that will provide treatment for victims—the physicians, nurses, hospital beds, and vaccines. Still, public health officials are looking seriously at how IT can give them an upper hand in pandemic surveillance, crisis communications, and planning.

IT figures prominently enough at the federal level that Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt has said a key part of his surveillance strategy would be to beef up an emerging disease reporting network called Biosense. The network, which Leavitt called a “breakthrough initiative” in healthcare IT, gathers data in near-real time (tens of thousands of reports a day) from 1100 VA hospitals, 700 Defense Department medical facilities, and more than 1100 LabCorp testing facilities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to add hospital emergency rooms in at least some cities to the list.

The data is sorted, analyzed, and presented in great detail in a variety of charts and graphs to satisfy virtually any query a public health official might have about infectious disease in his or her area. Data is displayed on maps to provide public health officials with a visual overview of emerging clusters of disease. For a great overview of Biosense, see http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su5401a4.htm.

More experimental at the federal level is pandemic planning software (also available as a Web application) called FluAid. The program provides a range of estimates of the impact a pandemic flu would have in terms of deaths, hospitalizations, and outpatient visits in every state, based on data such as hospital beds, risk group demographics, number of healthcare providers, and vaccination rates. You can try out the morbidly fascinating tool at http://www2.cdc.gov/od/fluaid/fluaid_page1.asp.

At the state level, Texas has a well-developed infrastructure for disease surveillance and for spreading the word about emerging health problems in the form of the Health Alert Network (see Computing Care, 11/2005). The highly secure Web-based system takes in electronic reports from labs and gathers data from other sources to track emerging problems. The alert system can reach as many as 14,000 medical and public safety contacts.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Texas has settled on one standard for its pandemic flu surveillance technology. According to the state’s draft Pandemic Influence Prepared-ness Plan released Oct 24, local health departments and health service regions around the state use (or are considering) different software for tracking influenza-like illnesses. The report mentions that two software applications are being considered for statewide use.

The field of epidemiology has benefited tremendously from the power of information technology to make information gathering, processing, and analysis faster and easier. We can all hope that if the avian flu does break out, technology will give us at least a little more of an edge in preventing its spread than we’ve had before.

The author of this column, David Orenstein, is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. If you have a question about a Computing Care column or to suggest a topic, email him at davealli@comcast.net.