Epidemiological Analysis and Early Warning of Disease Outbreaks By Automated Reading and Mining of Pre-Hospital Care Reports

This small exploratory grant will examine the use of optical character recognition (OCR) for handwriting in pre-hospital admission related to emergency medical services. When such information is put into digital form, it can be queried and accessed for various forms of analysis. Epidemiological analysis for identification and tracking of diseases will be one area of interest where statistical data available quickly after hospital admission is critical. Several government agencies in New York will participate, including the New York State Dept. of Health.