Throughout January we will be highlighting Emory’s and OTT’s work in infectious disease and vaccines. The ground breaking work begins in the Division of Infectious Disease and the Emory Vaccine Center.
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The Division of Infectious Disease has 59 faculty and 13 fellows, 5 administrators, and 89 research staff. There are 14 Professors, 7 Associate Professors, 34 Assistant Professors, and 4 Senior Associates or Instructors. The Division is proud of its outstanding accomplishments in a broad spectrum of research, including basic, translational, clinical, and epidemiologic sciences. The Division had more than $30 million in research funding in fiscal year 2013. (For more information: http://medicine.emory.edu/divisions/infectious_diseases/.)
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The Emory Vaccine Center is an epicenter of academic research and development of vaccines for both chronic and infectious diseases. With more than 250 faculty members and staff, it is the largest and most comprehensive academic vaccine research center in the world. The Center is making fundamental advances in immunology, virology, and vaccine research to search for life saving cures against the world’s most threatening diseases plaguing millions of individuals around the globe. (For more information: http://www.vaccines.emory.edu/.)
The first technology we are highlighting is SORT. There’s a very real fear in the healthcare world that during a pandemic, people with flu-like symptoms will flood emergency rooms and clinics, which will in turn become prime sites for disease transmission. The constant influx of patients could then topple an already overloaded healthcare system.
Emory researchers and clinicians developed a screening tool that could work outside the hospital setting, including via ambulatory care clinics, call centers, and the web, to reduce patient surges during a pandemic. The tool, called Strategy for Off Site Rapid Triage (SORT), assesses huge numbers of patients with the best and most current information from the field in order to identify the most severely ill and redirect the others away from crowded medical facilities without compromising care. Individuals are asked a series of questions then designated as low, intermediate, or high risk.
When H1N1 emerged in 2009 and was declared a pandemic, the Emory team pulled SORT off the shelf and quickly revised it to fit the H1N1 pandemic. And because millions of flu suffers might be reluctant to reach out to their doctor, or unable to contact one even if they tried, the Emory team developed a prototype website to help patients self-assess their condition using the science in the SORT process as well.
Now with SORT, healthcare providers and response teams can act rapidly to pandemics as well as to other emerging public health threats.
View the original full feature on our website here and our technology brief here.