When the need for speed is critical, how can a public health department communicate with doctors and hospitals, sending alerts to help prevent or stop a public health crisis? How can thousands of health-care providers be notified about disease outbreaks, illness from food borne contaminants or even a possible pandemic?

Researchers from the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. in collaboration with the Marion County Health Department (Indianapolis, Ind), have developed and tested a technology that allows public health officials to abandon a traditional, inefficient paper approach to alerting the medical community about public health crises in favor of an electronic strategy to seamlessly and instantly push out information critical to patient care.

Regenstrief is demonstrating its pioneering and potentially life saving technology to health care, government, public health, industry and other health information technology leaders at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) Conference and Exhibition April 4 - 8 in Chicago.

To enable instant delivery of public health alerts to physicians, Regenstrief health-care information technology professionals have created a web application that interfaces with their DOCS4DOCS® service, operated by the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE).

DOCS4DOCS is a clinical messaging service that delivers more than one million messages with information, such as laboratory or other test results, critical to patient care to physicians and other care providers each day throughout central Indiana…