Preliminary data show that parents in California are increasingly vaccinating their children
By N.L. & J.F.
DID the recent outbreak of measles in California encourage more parents to vaccinate their children? Scientists have worried that the opposite may be true. This is because media coverage of the vaccination debate tends to lend credibility to sceptics, as both sides—scientists and nervous parents—are given their say in an effort to create “balance”. The matter is hardly helped by politicians vacillating on the issue.
Finding data on vaccinations is actually more difficult than it sounds. Health records may be digital these days, but they are rarely easy to access. Instead, they are collected in isolated databases by different doctors and hospitals. Yet all is not lost. Athenahealth, a company that provides cloud-based electronic record storage to primary carers around the country, has enough clients to be able to follow health trends in real time. The data, generated anonymously, show an uptick in measles vaccinations in California the week starting January 25th, just as stories about the measles outbreak started taking off.
The data do not tell us anything about overall measles vaccination rates. The numbers merely show that more people in participating surgeries vaccinated their children this year than at the same time last year. There are other caveats: the data are not peer-reviewed, nor are they from a randomised poll of measles-vaccine providers. It could be that adopters of cloud-based electronic records are also especially adept at convincing hesitant parents to get jabs done, or that they serve an especially pliable clientele.
Still, this snapshot offers some good news. Parents are not necessarily fleeing from the measles vaccine. Indeed, they seem to be fleeing to it. Further research is now needed to learn how and why more parents are vaccinating their children.
This is not the first time that Athena has beaten the government in offering some valuable health statistics. In November the company also used its data to show that the flu season was coming early and that children were particularly susceptible to the strain.
This raises a larger point. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, mandated that all medical suppliers switch to electronic health records. The federal government has spent $30 billion to subsidise this push, with the goal of reducing paperwork and reining in administrative costs at hospitals. Given all this money, shouldn’t it be possible to gather data systematically from health-care providers without relying on a single private company? There are outbreaks of diseases all the time in America. Real-time national health data could help fight new scourges as they arise. The measles data are a hint of what a connected health care system of the future might look like. The future needs to hurry up.
