Hawaii set to award flu management contract
With $2.6 million, the custom system must track flu victims, hospital admissions, and drug distribution; due to large numbers of domestic and international visitors, as well as geographic isolation, Hawaii is particularly vulnerable to an epidemic; contract is just part of an $11 million pandemic campaign
The state of Hawaii is perhaps the most beautiful in the union, and also the most expensive. Not only is land scarce, it is thousands of miles away from both the American and Asian continent, and so residents pay a large premium on imported goods, even if they are just being “imported” from the American mainland. This distance also has health consequences, as a natural or man-made disaster could quickly result in a shortage of health care and food supplies, and the islands’ natural isolation makes large-scale evacuation almost impossible. For this reason, the Hawaii Department of Health (HDH) decided recently to purchase a custom-made pandemic flu management system. No commercial packages, planners discovered, were at all adequate. HDH plans to announce the winner of the $2.6 million contract by the end of November.
According to department analyst Steve Sakamoto, the winning management system will have to go beyond disease surveillance. As with a similar system we reported yesterday as undergoing installation in New England with the assistance of athenahealth FK, the Hawaiian solution requires outbreak management — the tracking of flu victims — hospital admissions and management of the warehousing, and distribution and use of antiviral medications and vaccines. The idea is to permit both real-time analysis of epidemic response, as well as to create a database of information for post-epidemic consideration. Tracking the distribution of drugs, for instance, and matching that data against known health outcomes, will help planners improve stockpiles in the future.
Investors and nervous vacationers take note: With more than two million visitors a year — many from Asia — state planners consider Hawaii a likely location of a flu outbreak. The $2.6 million flu management contract is just one part of a recently-approved $11 million line item that also includes the purchase of flu-fighting drugs and support for a public information campaign.
-read more in Bob Brewin’s GovHealthIT report
