Computerworld — If the H1N1, or swine, flu hits hard this fall and winter, emergency rooms will be on the front lines.

Business Intelligence Definition and Solutions

By using business intelligence-style analytic application, ERs may also be a key in efforts to determine how widely the disease is spreading in its early stages, which could help quash it before it grows out of control.

That's what Livingston, N. J.-based Emergency Medical Associates is expecting from its analytics system .

The firm operates 21 emergency rooms in hospitals in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, where its medical staff will treat more than 1 million patients this year. The crush of EMA ER patients from multiple locations provides a gold mine of data for spotting pandemics before they start raging, according to Jonathan Rothman, EMA director of data management.

EMA uses SAP AG's BusinessObjects XI tool set as its main BI platform, Xcelsius as its point-and-click data visualization tool, Crystal Reports for building the reports, and SAP's BusinessObjects Web Intelligence software to create self-service reports and dashboards. The software runs on top of an Oracle database.

In total, EMA physicians and nurses use 27 real-time dashboards and get 30 daily reports.

Generally, about 6% of patients that come into an EMA emergency room on any given day complain of fever and other flu-like symptoms, says Dr. Michael Gerardi, regional vice president for EMA.

By using the BI tools to compare recent activity with historical outbreaks of regular flu, EMA was the first medical provider to detect H1N1's arrival in New Jersey and New York during last spring's outbreak.

"The percentage of visitors complaining of flu-like symptoms spiked up to between 25-30% in some of our emergency rooms," Gerardi said.

Those upsurges of patients, along with their reported symptoms, were significant enough that EMA was able to determine with confidence that this was no "run-of-the-mill spring flu" nor an epidemic of "the worried well," Gerardi said.

Whether it's perceived flu or real flu doesn't necessarily matter to EMA, which must still deal with sudden influxes of patients either way, Gerardi said. The BI tools allow EMA to be much more agile, and re-assign nurses and doctors to hospitals that they predict will be slammed hard with new patients -- H1N1 sufferers and otherwise.