WHITE PLAINS CITIZENETREPORTER SETS RECORD VISITS FOR YEAR 7,017,658 VISITS! 2,098,003 VISITORS MADE 6 VISITS A DAY EVERY DAY. 63,330 UNIQUE VISITORS MADE 133,730 VISITS IN DECEMBER. WPCNR AVERAGED 17,284 VISITORS A WEEK, VISITING 31,270 TIMES.

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If there were a bioterrorism attack anywhere in the country, doctors would be at the front lines of response. But doctors in Westchester County now have one major advantage. As of January 2003, they now are part of a real-time automated data feed that tracks and analyzes the early symptoms of a would-be bioterrorism outbreak as exhibited by patients and analyzed by county health officials on a daily basis.

At the request of the Westchester County Department of Health (WCDH), the four-hospital Stellaris Health Network has successfully developed and implemented its Health Alert Network, an early-warning system to address bioterrorism threats via a real-time data feed from local hospitals concerning admitted and emergency-room patients that could be monitored to indicate a problem. Stellaris, the parent company and information technology coordinator of Lawrence Hospital Center in Bronxville, Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in Sleepy Hollow and White Plains Hospital Center in White Plains, was a logical choice to be the front-runners of such a system because with a single data feed it could sample four different geographical locations.

Shortly after the 9/11 terrorism attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the WCDH, under the leadership of Renee O’Rourke, Project Leader with the Department of Health,
approached Stellaris asking for help in coordinating such a surveillance system. Stellaris and county information technology officials met several times during the fall of 2001. Initially, the viability of such a data feed was questionable, says Eran Marom, Stellaris’ Vice President and Chief Information Officer.

“We did not think we were tracking the type of data one would be looking for such a system,” Marom says, explaining that in the end no additional patient information had to be collected, but only the way in which the system reported that information would be changed.

Stellaris’ technical staff then went to work to see whether such a system could be extracted from the hospital network as it existed, how it could be fed to the alert system, and at what frequency. “As the meetings progressed, we started to believe that this was doable,” says Marom.

The result: the county is now tracking and analyzing emergency-room data for four primary syndromes which could be indicators of communicable disease or virus: fever and flu, respiratory problems, diarrhea and vomiting. In addition to providing automatic daily notification to WCDH staff, the county also notifies the resulting analysis to local emergency rooms and other interested parties throughout Westchester County.

But for the data feed to mean anything, the data behind it has to be accurate. Dan Blum, Stellaris’ Vice President of Operations, contacted the emergency room managers of all four Stellaris network hospitals and was assured that the collected data indeed is entered accurately and that – even though it may not indicate a definitive patient diagnosis – it is the best approximation at the time of a patient’s arrival. “This assurance allowed us to gain a level of confidence in what we were offering the county,” says Blum.

“We were also concerned about patient confidentiality,” says Sharon Lucian, Stellaris Vice President and Privacy Officer. Although the Department of Health is considered a government entity that is allowed access to protected health information, Stellaris was uneasy about releasing patient information for this particular purpose. In the end, it was agreed that no information identifying a specific patient would be exchanged as part of the system.

So far, the early-warning system is operating consistently and reliably but, thankfully, has not yet identified any major spike requiring an alarm. “We will be working to further enhance and improve our surveillance activities, including expansion of hospitals reporting data, surveillance of outpatient data and automation,” says O’Rourke.

Indeed, Stellaris and its four-hospital network are on the cutting edge of the kind of surveillance technologies hospitals nationwide plan to implement, replacing more antiquated methods of patient information recording and databases and linking state and federal health officials — all in an attempt to thwart a potential mass bioterrorism outbreak.

Stellaris Health Network is based in Armonk, New York.

To find out more information, please contact Eran Marom at 914-242-7678 or by e-mail at emarom@stellarishealth.org.

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WPCNR MAIN STREET JOURNAL. By John F. Bailey. June 13, 2003: Mayor Joseph Delfino of White Plains announced this week that the City of White Plains would be announcing a new initiative to control illegal rooming houses in Battle Hill, Fisher Hill, North Broadway, and other areas in the city. He said he would be holding a news conference Tuesday of next week to go over the details and the cooperative effort that the police, Department of Building and fire departments will be undertaking to identify illegal rooming houses that the Mayor described as plaguing the city and taking advantage of lesser privileged citizens.

The Mayor announced the initiative at the meeting of the Council of Neighborhood Associations.

In a parallel initiative, Councilman Glen Hockley told WPCNR this week that a White Plains city judge has advised him that leveling stiffer penalities on landlords such as jail time, and assigning responsibility for housing displaced tenants, was definitely a possibility, and that nothing prevented the city from doing this to landlords identified and convicted of being consistent violators of housing zoning laws.

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WPCNR WHITE PLAINS VOICE. By John F. Bailey. June 12, 2003: When I interviewed David Brinkley, it was 1966, and the 6 foot 3 anchorman was visiting the Ohio Wesleyan University campus in Delaware, Ohio, (where I was matriculating). Mr. Brinkley was appearing as part of a Lecture-Movie Series.

I was a campus radio station News Director at the time and naturally sought an interview. Tables turned, Mr. Brinkley, after answering hundreds of questions from a packed house at OWU’s Grey Chapel hall, graciously submitted to one more set of questions from a nervous young reporter on Vietnam, the peace process, the like, treating me with a respect and courtesy I remember to this day.

He was serious, thoughtful, measured in his responses with the wry wit, and not in love with himself, as so many “reporters” are today. That was obvious from the way he looked me in the eye, smiled, and sought to put my nervousness at ease.

David Brinkley had class, poise, and a single mindedness of purpose to report things as he found them. He died Tuesday evening in Houston from a fall according to the Associated Press.

Because of how he treated me that day, I always remembered him with respect, and modeled myself after his courteous easy going style, or at least tried to. Viewers of White Plains Week who remember Mr. Brinkley’s days as “interpretative foil” to his Montana-bred sidekick, Chet Huntley, will recognize my homage to him in the show’s blatant steal of the Huntley, Brinkley signoff, in which Mr. Brinkley would end the nightly NBC newscast saying, “Goodnight Chet,” and Mr. Brinkley would respond in his gravelly voice, “Good night, David, and Good night for NBC News.”

The Huntley-Brinkley team revolutionized convention coverage where they would be on the air for hundreds of hours straight it seemed, with Mr. Brinkley droning on like a politicalized Mel Allen with anecdotes and observations, eruditely, cleverly delivered adlib. Mr. Brinkley set the style for political commentating in a style uniquely his own. He used the appropriate word. Something today’s anchorpersons have no command of whatsoever.

Mr. Brinkley made you pay attention with his softspoken, in control style, that never rattled, with no fear of expressing his opinions of speeches, events, and directions matters were heading. He directed his own questioning, asked hard questions, and made the interview about his subject, not himself.

He was an original and can be said, in his style, to have elevated the profession of news reading to the level of news anchoring, anchoring being the art of getting at why things happened, and shedding light on where they are going and bringing out the story behind the story. This subtle elevation of the art of news created by Mr. Brinkley bringing what Edward R. Murrow did in specials, to the news every day was pioneering in an era where the media were far more pressured by politicians than they are today.

The Huntley Brinkley Report as Mr. Brinkley’s show was known was the first to use two anchors to deliver the news to hold viewers’ attention and it made NBC News instantly competitive with CBS, thanks to Mr. Brinkley’s colorful and thought-provoking delivery.

He was able to do this because he wrote and spoke in a style that was thoughtful. He strung together words well adlib and mastered the end of the sentence zinger, which is not an easy thing to do.

Mr. Brinkley did not style his hair. He did not dye it as he aged, as anchors do today. He did not have plastic surgery, or whiten his teeth. Up to his last few years, he would appear on camera for ABC with snowwhite hair his craggy aged face without pretentions. He reported. He was not the story. He called the stories as he found them, he did not spin them.

Good night, David, and thank you for U.S.A. News.