Service Experience

When a contagious illness sweeps through a community, people commonly learn about it from first-hand experience (they or someone they know gets ill) or from the news media (a broadcast alerting the public to “flu season”). The news media get their information from city health officials, who get their information from medical professionals, who get their information from direct patient contact. However, before getting an appointment or even choosing to see a doctor, people commonly try to treat the symptoms themselves with store-bought remedies. The cumulative data tracking of medication sales can be an essential early indicator of a city's health status. This type of monitoring is called syndronic surveillance.

The National Retail Data Monitor is a public health surveillance tool developed at the University of Pittsburgh to identify disease outbreaks and possible incidents of bioterrorism. The NRDM uses data from a consortium of food and drug retail industry, state and local health departments, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to create an overview of public health in 44 states, the District of Colombia, and Puerto Rico . An interface of customizable maps and graphs allow public health officials to zoom in to cities and zoom out the country as a whole to track abnormal spikes and drops that could indicate an outbreak.

This tool is designed to monitor diseases substantially above and beyond the common contagious illnesses that move through communities. Access to the NRDM is restricted to registered, pre-approved public health officials over a secure extranet.