Earlier this month, the Boston Public Health Commission received a prestigious national award for its sophisticated tracking system that enables the agency to quickly recognize outbreaks of illnesses in Boston and rapidly respond to them.

Using technology originally developed for mass disasters, Boston disease trackers focused on creating a citywide medical registry of everyone who has had a flu vaccination. The vaccination map produced would allow fast action in neighborhoods left vulnerable to fast-moving respiratory illnesses such as the seasonal flu or the deadly H1N1 virus, if a serious breakout were to occur.

Boston’s cutting edge system makes novel use of the typical information wristbands patients receive when they are checked in to a hospital. Rather than plain text, the wristbands are stamped with a barcode that contains basic patient information such as name, age and gender. And they go a step further… the barcodes also track when a patient received a flu shot, the arm to which it was injected, and when and by whom it was administered.

Once the patient’s check-up is complete, the barcode wristband is scanned like an express package from FedEx, and the information is stored for future referral.

Before the introduction of the Boston Syndromic Surveillance System (B-SYNSS), public health officials had only slivers of basic information on citywide diseases seen in emergency department visits in Boston. Now, the surveillance system allows officials to monitor and deduce reoccurring visits from different areas of the city. The system sheds light on which neighborhoods have residents who are more thoroughly vaccinated, thus allowing the city to take faster, more direct action to stem outbreaks.

“When we can quickly inform healthcare providers about disease activity in the community, there is less delay in diagnosis,” said Julia R. Gunn, a register nurse and director of the Communicable Disease Control Division at the Boston Public Health Commission.

Because of this technology, the Commission’s Infectious Disease Bureau will receive the 2009 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) Davies Public Health Award of Excellence.

The award honors Dr. Nicholas E. Davies, an Atlanta based physician, and a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Improving the Patient Record. Dr. Davies believed that computer-based patient record was needed to improve patient care. In 1991, Dr. Davies along with Senator John Tower died in an airplane crash.

“The achievements of the BPHC demonstrate how managing and sharing patient data with their information systems have had a positive impact on the health status of the populations they serve,” said Amy Ising, chair of the HIMSS Davies Public Health Steering Committee. “All of us on the committee congratulate these recipients for their dedication and commitment to public health.”

When Boston bought the monitoring system, designed by EMSystems, emergency personnel had another idea on the brain. (No, it wasn’t tracking people like tagged cattle, as some Big Brother conspirators think.) Rather, they wanted to track people injured in big fires, plane crashes, or other disasters as they went on to rehabilitation. However, something else popped to mind.

Infectious disease specialists in Boston figured that a registry approach could prove even more intuitive if something more devastating where to hit such as a bio-terrorism attack or long-feared arrival of a global flu pandemic. If such a crisis were to occur, what better way for the registry to track those who received a special vaccine or antidote to a deadly germ?

Last Spring, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, said the surveillance system was critical to helping the city contain the spread of the H1N1 virus. “We were able to track trends in Boston, including the age groups that were most affected and the areas of the city where we were seeing the most flu activity,” she said. “That allowed us to target prevention resources most effectively in real time.”

In times of mass panic, people could be spread out to different medical facilities then they are used to. To break this down to brass tacks, every fall in medical offices across the country, flu vaccine pours in and the perishable product must be delivered to millions in a matter of months. By keeping track of the vaccine, which can be a hellish process of either paper forms or electronic data entry, medical examiners will have a better understanding of which patients are getting it, and making sure those who need it receive it. Who doesn’t feel better when things are organized?

If you’re thinking that when you go to the doctor they will be able to pinpoint your exact flu shot like some sort of GPS tracker, that’s not the case. The data is simply a way to avoid physicians from prescribing too much vaccine if you already have one, and to also figure out why some patients had to wait longer than others to be vaccinated. It is simply a way to find the potholes in the patient record system and correcting it.

Along with the BPHC, Denver Public Health will also receive a Davies Award for its clinical information system. The awards will be presented in March 2010 at the HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in Atlanta.