Jonathan Rothman and Mike Gerardi, MD, see themselves as a perfect match for the work they do.

Rothman heads up data management operations at Emergency Medical Associates, a group of physicians that provide emergency services, and Gerardi, an emergency room physician, oversees EMA’s H1N1 task force.

“What we have here is a true marriage between technology and process,” Rothman said.

For EMA and the 21 hospital emergency departments it manages and staffs in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the link has meant hospitals can be better prepared for an anticipated outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu, this fall.

EMA, which developed its own in-house electronic record system 20 years ago – 100 percent of the 360 doctors use it, notes Gerardi – employs business intelligence software from SAP BusinessObjects to track the flu.

“A lot of what we’ve done and what we continue to do is ahead of the curve,” Rothman said.

EMA had already put a tracking infrastructure in place – Rothman and Gerardi call it syndromic surveillance – before 9/11 hit to track incidences of anthrax and biological outbreaks.

“When it came to H1N1, the solution we built on SAP was extremely scalable,” Rothman said.

Rothman and Gerardi were confident technology could help spot an epidemic in the making long before doctors and nurses could.

There were two outbreaks in the region EMA was helping to monitor In Hudson and Essex counties in New Jersey and New York City – in April and June 2009.

With 4,000 people hitting the ERs every day, the software helped not only to identify spikes in ER visits, but also monitored in real-time the symptoms the patients presented – headaches, abdominal pain, cough, fever, distress.

 “By drilling down into specific syndromes in our patient reports, we can pinpoint spikes in fever and flu-like symptoms that are swine flu indicators,” said Rothman. “Then we compare it with our large archive of historical information to figure out where we stand. When statistics for a particular symptom exceed standard deviation, we know we’ve got a problem on our hands.”

SAP software helps save EMA time by bringing together information from several disparate systems so that end users can make sense of clinical data, operational data, financial data and satisfaction data.

With up-to-the-minute insight into swine flu symptoms, EMA can help gauge if and when another outbreak might occur,” said Marge Breya, an executive vice president at SAP. “By sharing this data with its own network and beyond, hospitals and government agencies can all benefit from the valuable information by changing staffing and response plans, which helps to increase quality of care while reducing costs.”

Businsess intelligence technology enables EMA to do all of this quickly, Rothman said, “and it’s helped us save lives. By having the right amount of medical resources available to patients in the most urgent times, we can provide proper treatment and help mitigate the spreading of the virus.”

Gerardi said EMA’s goal – given that it is in the most populated area of the country – is to “share this with as many people as we can.”

EMA contacted state epidemiologists and shared its data with local, state and federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Across the country at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif, Michael Gallagher, MD, achieved something similar to EMA’s approach to tracking swine flu, by tinkering with Microsoft technology called Amalga – a day before it was to go live. Using Amalga, El Camino was able to track patients presenting with swine flu symptoms in real time, rather than after the fact as is typically done.

“We created a new application,” Gallagher said.

“We created a new area of data base, adjusted the front end, and identified bits of information we needed to do the reporting we do,” he said. “Together it added up to something very powerful. It was delightful. It was surprising.”