The 2012 National Strategy for Biosurveillance (BSV) recognizes that a well-integrated national BSV enterprise must provide essential information for better decision making at all levels. Submitting an electronic bill following HC services is the most mature and widely used form of eHealth. HIPAA-compliant eHRCs captured in e-commerce can be consolidated into big HC data centers and used for many purposes including BSV. eHRCs are standardized and each claim contains pertinent person, place, and time information that can be leveraged for BSV. IMS Health (IMS) is a global HC information company and maintains one of worldÃs largest eHealth data centers that processed information including eHRCs on >260M unique U.S. patients in 2012.
Objective
This paper describes how high-volume electronic healthcare (HC) reimbursement claims (eHRCs) from providers' offices and retail pharmacies can be used to provide timely and accurate influenza-like illness (ILI) situational awareness at state and CBSA levels