A one-of-a-kind biosurveillance system is being implemented by New York's largest health provider to fight the deadly flu outbreak there on the ground in nearly real time, something the federal government has been working on for years with no apparent success.
The Northwell Health emergency operations unit on Long Island is working around the clock to plug in a cutting-edge flu surveillance system that eliminates the typical one-to-two week time lag on flu data currently delivered by health officials by gathering data from surrounding hospitals in real time, CBS News reported.
The new biosurveillance system allows health officials to monitor flu case spikes and send appropriate resources to specific areas, said Mary Mahoney, vice president of emergency management, not to mention just knowing what’s going on as it it’s actually happening.
“Things like do we have enough masks to protect our patients and our families and our staff,” Mahoney said. “If a large number of this population is pediatric population … Do we have the appropriate doses of Tamiflu for them if we're going to be treating them with Tamiflu.”
The U.S. is in the grip of a deadly flu outbreak which has claimed the lives of more than 37 children already this season, although that number could be far higher, The Daily Mail reported.
The lack of real-time information is telling.
Dr. Dan Jernigan, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the actual pediatric death toll could be closer to 80 and he expects that number to rise to 150 by the end of March.
It’s believed that more than 50,000 Americans could die by the end of this flu season. The Washington Post reported that nearly 12,000 people are hospitalized with confirmed cases of flu, a 3,000 increase in just one week.
But the data is fragmented and anecdotal, as anyone reading and listening to news can tell.
In 2014 the federal government announced it was working on a biosurveillance system that would allow officials near real-time access to private medical information, CNS News reported, but it's yet to surface.
The Department of Health and Human Services put out a 52-page draft of the proposed “National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018” for comment. It said information would be gathered through “collecting, aggregating and processing data from both traditional and nontraditional sources (such as social media) and from various governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders.”
CNS News noted that, according to a “National Biosurveillance Science and Technology Roadmap” written last June, “effectively, appropriately, and securely sharing health event data, including parts of electronic patient records and laboratory data, has significant potential to improve national awareness of incidents that could progress to impact national security.”
Northwell is hoping that its biosurveillance unit will be a model and that it not only can help health officials target specific locations and problems during this flu outbreak but also help in the future to track and respond to other disease outbreaks, CBS News said.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.