The developers are using extract, transform and load tools from Informatica Corp. to send data to the warehouse. They're also using business intelligence and data mining tools from SAS Institute Inc. to analyze the information coming from the hospitals.

The hospitals are sending the data -- including patient symptoms, diagnoses and geographic information -- to the CDC over the Internet as Web services messages using the ebXML standard to guarantee reliability and secure the exchange of the messages.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston began sending feeds to the CDC on Dec. 21, about a month after the agency asked it to join the program, said John Halamka, CIO at the hospital's parent company, CareGroup Healthcare System. The hospital now sends the data to the CDC as Web services every 15 minutes, he said.

"This is really the first time in history there have been real-time hospital connections to public health [agencies]," said Halamka, who's also a Computerworld columnist. Beth Israel spent US$50,000 to build its piece of the system, he added.

The CDC expects the emergency room data to provide it with "situational awareness" during a pandemic or bioterrorist attack, Rhodes said. "It is very important that we have information from hospitals on a real-time or near-real-time basis so we can get a snapshot of what is going on at that moment," he said.