Real-time clinician text feeds from electronic health records

Analyses of search engine and social media feeds have been attempted for infectious disease outbreaks 1 , but have been found to be susceptible to artefactual distortions from health scares or keyword spamming in social media or the public internet 2–4 . We describe an approach using real-time aggregation of keywords and phrases of free text from real-time clinician-generated documentation in electronic health records to produce a customisable real-time viral pneumonia signal providing up to 2 days warning for secondary care capacity planning. This low-cost approach is open-source, is locally customisable, is not dependent on any specific electronic health record system and can be deployed at multiple organisational scales.