Epic Introduces Health Alerts to Monitor County-Level Illness Trends
Epic, a major electronic health record company, has launched a new feature designed to monitor health trends at the county level and issue alerts when there are elevated rates of illness. This feature, developed by Epic Research, utilizes statistical models applied to real-world medical records to detect when the incidence of a health condition in a county surpasses expected levels. Each alert undergoes a review by Epic Research's team, which includes clinicians and data scientists, to ensure its clinical relevance and appropriateness for public reporting. The alerts are accessible through Epic's dashboard, and users can subscribe to receive them via email. The tool has already flagged increased rates of conditions such as acute bronchiolitis, acute tonsillitis, measles, strep throat, and viral gastroenteritis in various states including Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and South Carolina. The data for these alerts is sourced from Epic's Cosmos platform, which contains records for 300 million patie... 
