Emis Tools Helping to Map Out Health of the Nation

John Collingridge | Yorkshire Post | September 27, 2011

Lying just a few miles north of London, the soot cloud in 2005 risked sending rates of lung and heart complaints soaring in the densely-packed capital. Before long, government health advisers turned to QSurveillance. The real-time patient assessment tool was one of the fastest ways of measuring the impact of the disaster on the nation’s health.

As clouds of black smoke billowed above the burning Buncefield oil depot and began spreading across southern England, health experts knew they had to act fast.
It was clear the toxic cloud from Britain’s worst peacetime industrial disaster posed a huge threat to respiratory health.

Lying just a few miles north of London, the soot cloud in 2005 risked sending rates of lung and heart complaints soaring in the densely-packed capital. Before long, government health advisers turned to QSurveillance. The real-time patient assessment tool was one of the fastest ways of measuring the impact of the disaster on the nation’s health.

Covering millions of GPs’ patients, it would be one of the first systems to pick up on a surge in breathing problems. Fortunately, the disaster’s health impact turned out to be relatively small, but QSurveillance has since proved its worth to the nation’s health...

...QResearch has also spawned a wide – and medically significant – range of other studies. QRisk analyses risk of heart disease; QDScore predicts the risk of diabetes; QFracture analyses the risk of hip fracture. The algorithms are open source – meaning researchers can use it to develop their own risk tools...