Hopkins Researchers Find "Google Flu Trends" A Powerful Early Warning System
for Emergency Departments
- Reported, January 13, 2012
 Monitoring Internet search traffic about influenza may prove to be a better
way for hospital emergency rooms to prepare for a surge in sick patients
compared to waiting for outdated government flu case reports. A report on the
value of the Internet search tool for emergency departments, studied by a team
of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine over a 21-month period, is published in
the January 9 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The researchers reported a strong correlation between a rise in Internet
searches for flu information, compiled by Google’s Flu Trends tool, and a
subsequent rise in people coming into a busy urban hospital emergency room
complaining of flu-like symptoms.
For the study, the researchers tracked and reviewed Google Flu Trends data for
Baltimore City, along with data on people seeking care, into the separate adult
and pediatric emergency departments at The Johns Hopkins Hospital from January
2009, to October 2010.
Richard Rothman, M.D., Ph.D., an emergency medicine physician and researcher at
the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and the senior
investigator on the study, says the results show promise for eventually
developing a standard regional or national early warning system for frontline
health care workers.
Rothman and lead study investigator Andrea Dugas, M.D., recently hosted a
national conference in Baltimore of experts from around the country to discuss
the implications of their findings. In the long term, says Rothman, the Johns
Hopkins team hopes to develop a highly reliable flu surveillance model that all
emergency departments could use to reasonably predict a spike in the number of
flu-like cases. Such a system, he says, could help emergency department
directors and senior administrators prepare by beefing up staffing or opening up
patient annexes.
Rothman and his team found the correlation between Internet searches and patient
volume was most pronounced when researchers reviewed data showing a rise in
search traffic for flu information and the number of children coming into the
Hopkins pediatric emergency room with what doctors call influenza-like illness
or ILI.
Although the science and medical community has generally accepted that a rise in
flu search queries on Google Flu Trends corresponds with a rise in people
reporting flu-like symptoms, the Johns Hopkins team is believed to be the first
to show that the Flu Trends data strongly correlates with an upswing in
emergency room activity.
Currently, emergency departments, hospitals and other health care providers rely
on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu case reports provided during
flu season, October to May, as a key way to track flu outbreaks.
However, the researchers say those traditional reports, compiled using a
combination of data about hospital admissions, laboratory test results and
clinical symptoms, are often weeks old by the time they reach practitioners and
hospitals. Thus, they don’t provide frontline health care workers with a strong
tool to prepare day-to-day for a surge in flu cases, even as the flu is
spreading in real time, Rothman notes.
Google Flu Trends, on the other hand, collects and provides data on search
traffic for flu information on a daily basis by detecting and analyzing certain
flu-related search terms. The company says the search queries, when combined,
are good indicators of flu activity. Users of the free service can narrow their
data reports to geographic regions, time frames and other denominators.
Credits:The Johns Hopkins University National Center for the Study of
Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response,Yu-Hsiang Hsieh, Ph.D.; Scott R.
Levin, Ph.D.; Jesse M. Pines, M.D.; Darren P. Mareiniss, M.D.; Amir Mohareb;
Charlotte A. Gaydos, Dr. P.H., M.S., M.P.H..; and Trish M. Perl, M.D.
More Information at:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/_hopkins_researchers_find_google_flu_
trends_a_powerful_early_warning_system_for_emergency_departments
More Reference:Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
Seasonal influenza epidemics are a major public health concern, causing tens of
millions of respiratory illnesses and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each
year. In addition to seasonal influenza, a new strain of influenza virus against
which no previous immunity exists and that demonstrates human-to-human
transmission could result in a pandemic with millions of fatalities. Early
detection of disease activity, when followed by a rapid response, can reduce the
impact of both seasonal and pandemic influenza3, 4. One way to improve early
detection is to monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to
online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world
each day. Here we present a method of analysing large numbers of Google search
queries to track influenza-like illness in a population. Because the relative
frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of
physician visits in which a patient presents with influenza-like symptoms, we
can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each
region of the United States, with a reporting lag of about one day. This
approach may make it possible to use search queries to detect influenza
epidemics in areas with a large population of web search users.
Credits:Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer,
Mark S. Smolinski & Larry Brilliant.
More Information at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature07634.html
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