Epic Introduces County-Level Health Alerts to Monitor Rising Illness Rates
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 elevated rates of illness are detected. This initiative, developed by Epic Research, utilizes statistical models applied to real-world medical records to identify when the rate of a health condition exceeds expected levels. The alerts are reviewed by a team of clinicians and data scientists to ensure they are clinically meaningful before being published. The tool has already flagged increased rates of conditions such as acute bronchiolitis, measles, and strep throat in various states including Illinois and Missouri. The alerts are based on data from Epic's Cosmos platform, which contains records for 300 million patients. 
