UK creates nation's first cancer-reporting system that uses electronic health records

Kentucky has the highest incidence of cancer in the United States, but it is about to be a national leader in delivering information about cancer cases to researchers.

With the help of an almost $1 million Centers for Disease Control grant, the University of Kentucky has created the nation's first working model for electronic reporting of cases to the state cancer registry. Kentucky's cancer doctors will be able to feed clinical data to the state's epidemiologists immediately so that they can see and analyze cancer statistics more quickly that ever before.

“This project is laying the groundwork for electronic reporting not only in Kentucky but across the United States,” said Eric Durbin, director of Cancer Informatics at the Kentucky Cancer Registry and one of the investigators who created the model. (Read more)

Swine flu killed nearly 300,000 worldwide, study finds

The swine flu of 2009, often referred to as H1NI, killed an estimated 284,500 people, making it 15 times more deadly than it was thought at the time of the pandemic, a new study has found. The report, published Tuesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, said the numbers might be eventually be  as high as 579,000 people. The original count, tabulated by the World Health Organization, was a mere 18,500.

Those nearly 300,000 deaths were confirmed by lab testing, which the WHO warned vastly underestimated the situation "because the deaths of people without access to the health system go uncounted, and because the virus is not always detectable after a victim dies," reports Sharon Begley for Reuters. In Kentucky, the Department for Public Health reported there were 41 confirmed H1N1-related deaths, said spokeswoman Beth Fisher.

More than 50 percent of swine flu deaths were in Africa and southeast Asia, though they only account for 38 percent of the world's population. Because vital statistics data are either non-existent or incomplete in poorer countries, researchers had to rely on estimates and assumptions but did start with hard data, including the number of health workers who went door-to-door to ask about flu-like symptoms in rural areas and obtained nasal and throat swab samples. They used these numbers to get an estimate on the proportion of a country's population infected with H1N1. Results show the flu killed two to three times more people in Africa than elsewhere. It infected children most, adults moderately and the elderly hardly at all. (Read more)

Kentucky needs system to track hospital infections, doctor says

Kentucky is in need of a single, accurate system that tracks hospital-acquired infections in order to improve health care and receive state and federal funding, an op-ed piece in The Courier-Journal contends. (Hospitals call these "healthcare-associated infections," keeping the HAI acronym but spreading the blame. --Editor)

"The need for accurate data cannot be overstated," writes Dr. Kevin Kavanagh of Somerset. "Data on infections is vital to address epidemics, to direct research, to develop antibiotics and for the state to receive grants and devise prevention protocols."

But Kentucky's reporting system is "duplicative and broken," Kavanagh contends, with no standardized system. "Facilities can make the same report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the [state] health department and to the hospital's Patient Safety Organization," he said. Though HAIs should be reported in Kentucky, only four outbreaks were conveyed by hospitals last year. "As of December, the definition of an 'outbreak' was not agreed upon, which makes data collection and grant funding difficult," Kavanagh writes.

To combat the problem, 22 states are using The National Healthcare Safety Network run for free by the CDC to collect their data, which Kavanagh advises. He also encourages transparency and commended Norton Healthcare for posting information about treatment of catheter- and ventilator-associated infections. Because of this transparency, the provider received an award from the National Quality Forum. But "the problem of hospital-acquired infections and conditions is too big, too important and has gone on far too long to depend solely upon hospitals to correct the problem," Kavanagh argues. (Read more)