Sounds like an editor’s dream: iPhone, swine flu, and advanced IT all in the same article. Link courtesy of the ACM.

“The application, “Outbreaks Near Me,” builds upon the mission and proven capability of HealthMap, an online resource that collects, filters, maps and disseminates information about emerging infectious diseases, and provides a new, contextualized view of a user’s specific location”.

A Healthcare Informatics blog by Marc Paradis analyses HP’s view of Business Intelligence Trends for 2009. The latter is relevant because trend #10 is “CEP comes of age”. The HP author(s) make the common mistake of confusing event stream processing with its superset complex event processing, but otherwise contend that CEP should take on from BAM as being relevant to BI. I disagree though with their theory that BI vendors are acquiring CEP providers - indeed the opposite is true. Case in point: TIBCO, an event processing company, acquired Spotfire, a BI (albeit 2nd generation BI player) about 2 years ago, and Syndera (the event-driven dashboard) last year - not the other way round. One does though wonder how traditional BI vendors can remain relevant as businesses demand better operational - meaning event-driven -  insight (for example by resorting to CEP implementations).

In healthcare, Marc comments:

BI in the HIT context requires subject matter, analytical and clinical expertise to collect and interpret ambiguous requirements, to derive and/or validate algorithms to implement those requirements and finally to assess the clinical relevance of any findings and to initiate necessary process improvements from those findings.

Applying expertise to events and data via rules is exactly the domain of CEP solutions like TIBCO BusinessEvents, with or without the human (or doctor, if there is time) in the loop.

Marc ends with:  Simplicity simply isn’t an option. Too true. And CEP can help make the complexity manageable.

The UK’s Register had an interesting white paper advertised as “University Hospitals Bristol gain real-time view of bed availability”. As healthcare is one of the next IT wastelands that could really benefit from event processing (think real-time medical monitoring, patient track and trace, specialist resource real-time optimization, etc), I was disappointed to find  this was an advertorial for… Sharepoint! It’s a bit like TIBCO claiming its Portal product provides the smarts for a real-time dashboard, rather than just being the container for such displays. One hopes that UH Bristol is doing a bit more than just having some web part polling some database with “end-of-day” ward bed reports and then relying on doctors telephone the wards to try and book any available beds…

[For non-UK readers, UK hospitals are usually managed under the National Health Service: like any government body, it is widely considered as heavy on bureaucracy and light on "customer focus", with a common budget-saving mechanism of closing patient wards leading to situations where hospital beds are scarce resources.]