AMARILLO, TEXAS - Back in 2009, Anna Beth Bryde was so sick with the H1N1 virus she couldn't even leave the house. All she wanted to do was sleep.
"Then my husband catches it, and we went to the doctor, and she's like you're lucky enough you're alive," Bryde said.
Under the current Health Department Monitoring monitoring system, the hospital she went to had to wait for blood tests to confirm a positive result before notifying the health department about her H1N1 case. But soon, a new computer program will allow all Amarillo hospitals to track common patient symptoms and send that information to the health department daily - leading to an earlier outbreak warning for the public.
"It's important because we need a way to understand what's happening in the community in real time instead of waiting for lab results," Public Health Director Matt Richardson said.
The ERs won't send any private patient data, just tallies of how many patients they saw with things like sore throats.
"So if we have 20 or 30 people that report to the ER in 2 hours with flu like symptoms, that's going to let us at the health department know there's a problem," Richardson said.
The whole thing's being paid for by a $30,000 grant from the state, and city leaders say it's especially important now that Amarillo's becoming an international city with some refuges bringing in illnesses like TB.
"This will just help us make sure it doesn't get out of hand, because we recognize we have a challenge and we're going to address it," City Commissioner Lilia Escajeda said.
And of course Bryde says some more advanced warning about a local H1N1 outbreak would have been nice, and she thinks maybe this new system could have helped her not to get sick.
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