Software helps county track influenza cases at schools, day care

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ROCKFORD — The Winnebago County Health Department is more vigilantly tracking seasonal flu information from schools and day care centers this year with the help of a new online program designed by a local advertising agency.

Health Department officials worked with KMK Media Group to create the Web application. The effort is meant to hone in on flu “hot spots” to protect the community from a flu outbreak, especially with the heightened concern about H1N1.

It also helps the health department direct its future medical and preventive care efforts and be more efficient in monitoring the data.

“It’s nice to be able to take a total picture of the entire county and look at what’s happening, and we’re getting cooperation from private and parochial schools as well as public schools,” said Dee Dunnett, the Health Department’s director of the center for health protection and promotion.

Doug Burton, a Web developer and marketing specialist for KMK Media Group, helped create the custom-built application from scratch for the department.

Before the program was developed, the Health Department was manually entering data based on faxes and phone calls from education officials.

With the new system, schools and public day care facilities received a username and password that they use to log on to the Health Department’s home page to report any absences where flu-like symptoms are a known factor. Participation is voluntarily, but Dunnett said they’ve gotten an excellent response from the schools.

Schools and day cares enter data like the total enrollment and total number of absent staff members and students with flu-like symptoms, and the system then calculates the absentee percentage, flagging it if it’s more than 10 percent. School and day care officials also are supposed to call the Health Department if the absentee rate is more than 10 percent.

It’s not unusual to see absentee rates of more than 10 percent, Health Department Administrator Mike Bacon said. The 10-percent threshold was set to reinforce the importance of maintaining a dialogue between schools, day care centers and the Health Department.

Dunnett said that while the department is working with day care centers, officials are focusing primarily on school-age children in pre-kindergarten through high school classes.

Numbers from the program are included in the department’s weekly influenza activity surveillance reports, which are featured on the health department’s Web site. The school-specific daily absentee data is not available to the public, and the individual schools only have access to their own data.

Burton said KMK would happily work with other counties that might be interested in the flu reporting application.

“Especially with this economy, people are looking to find resources that help make business more efficient,” Burton said. “It boils down to helping (the Health Department) respond to the community.”

Reach staff writer Melissa Westphal at mwestpha@rrstar.com or 815-987-1341.

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