The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a number of initiatives to attempt to track Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and in particular outbreaks of H1N1. On Sept. 1, CDC began securely exchanging public health data daily via the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The pilot project is gathering flu symptom data from health care providers in Indiana, New York and Washington state.The full article can be found at:

http://fcw.com/Articles/2009/10/26/CDC-expands-flu-tracking-efforts.aspx

Pangaea Information Technologies, Ltd. has been working on a project in collaboration with Rush University Medical Center called GUARDIAN (Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Notification) which provides an AI based approach to detecting diseases including ILI and H1N1. GUARDIAN is currently generating daily and weekly reports on likely and confirmed H1N1 cases.

GUARDIAN uses a variety of techniques — from simple code look-up-tables to advanced natural-language processing algorithms — to transform and standardize these disparate data sources into a relational, hierarchical data structure that is optimized for infectious disease modeling. Additionally, GUARDIAN has a flexible and modular architecture in addition to a real-time web-based user interface. This allows GUARDIAN to be used for monitoring of any set of infectious diseases in real-time (in addition to the daily and weekly summary reports that it generates).