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GlobalStrat
Contributes to Design of a National Retail Data Monitor for Public
Health Surveillance. Journal of the American Medical
Informatics Association 10/5 (Sept/Oct) 409-418, 2003. http://www.jamia.org/
Abstract:
We
built a Retail Data Monitor for public health surveillance for the
Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, and then extended the Pennsylvania system to national
scale, receiving daily data
from three of the largest retailers representing over 9,000
pharmacies and retail stores that sell
healthcare products. A small number of national companies account
for a large portion of sales
of over-the-counter healthcare products in the United States.
These
companies utilize Universal
Product Codes and scanners to collect sales information nationwide
in near real time, and they
process sales data centrally, enabling us to collect sales data for
an entire national retail chain
from a single point. We designed user interfaces to display the data
on timelines and maps and
adapted detection algorithms to monitor the data automatically on a
daily basis for unusual
patterns of sales.
We offer the resulting data and analyses free of
charge to health departments
nationwide. Future plans include continued enrollment and support of
health departments,
transition of the system to ongoing management by the CDC, and
further refinements of the data
collection system to further reduce the time latency of receipt of
the data.
Authored by: Michael M. Wagner MD PhD, J. Michael Robinson,
Fu-Chiang Tsui PhD, Jeremy U. Espino, M.D., William R. Hogan, MD.
Affiliation of the authors: The RODS Laboratory, Center for
Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (MMW,
FCT, JUE, WRH)
Global Strategic Solutions, Cincinnati Ohio (JMR)
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