Massachusetts General Hospital, New England's largest medical facility, has deployed a new surveillance system designed to help the Massachusetts Department of Public Health reduce the risk of major outbreaks of communicable diseases.
The new solution from the Partners Healthcare System, a Boston-based integrated healthcare network formed in 1994, is a high-volume system built on the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform, which processes more than 91 million HL7 messages annually.
"Massachusetts General participates in a disease surveillance system that is also processing transactions from Brigham & Women's Hospital, Newton-Wellesley Hospital and Faulkner Hospital," said Partners CTO Steve Flammini. With the addition of an estimated 85,000 messages per day coming from Massachusetts General, about 250,000 messages are flowing into the system's Ensemble hub on a daily basis.
The Partners Healthcare network includes Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General, as well as some 5,000 practicing physicians attending to 4 million outpatient visits and 160,000 admissions annually.
The Ensemble software platform and messaging engine is used to develop and integrate mission-critical applications as well as establish an enterprise service bus or SOA infrastructure.
"Based on input from our analysts, we added rules to the Ensemble engine that automatically search for data and test results associated with communicable diseases specified by the MDPH," Flammini said. Only the relevant messages – about 80 each day after filtering with Ensemble – are sent to the MDPH for analysis of disease trends.
The new MDPH system is designed to deliver constant disease information updates every eight hours, on a basis of 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The benefit to healthcare consumers, according to a press release, is that the MDPH receives informed updates that enables it to reduce the potential of major outbreaks of communicable diseases like tuberculosis, encephalitis, Lyme disease and sexually transmitted diseases. The MDPH can also analyze disease patterns that may turn out to be early warning signs of otherwise unforeseen epidemics.
