New York City, hospital group team up to list patients on Web

By Jason Miller

Connecting state and local government leaders

| September 17, 2001

Within 12 hours of last Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center in New York, city officials and Stream 57, a company owned by the Greater New York Hospital Association, collaborated to post on the Web the names of people treated for injuries sustained in the attack.

Within 12 hours of last Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center in New York, city officials and Stream 57, a company owned by the Greater New York Hospital Association, collaborated to post on the Web the names of people treated for injuries sustained in the attack.Stream 57 created a patient locator site linked directly to New York City's site, at , that enabled family members and friends to search by a person's first or last name and find out where he or she was being treated.'We always are intimately involved in the city's emergency management needs, so it just seemed logical to help the city provide accurate information,' said Brian Conway, assistant director of pubic affairs for the hospital association.Originally, the site was to be for internal use only, but staff in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office decided the page would be more useful if it was open to the public, Conway said. The association worked out a deal with Intel Online Services Inc. of Chantilly, Va., to provide Web hosting for at least 90 days.'We needed more space on the servers to handle the amount of traffic we were expecting, and Intel was good enough to help out,' said Ben Chodor, Stream 57's chief technology officer. 'We have created a lot of different databases, so we took our fundamental knowledge and applied it to this situation. The whole goal was to give the public somewhere to call as a starting place.'The site had received more than 1.2 million page views and listed more than 5,000 patients as of 7 a.m. today.The Web site pulls data from at least 54 hospitals into a Microsoft SQL Server 6.0 database running on Intel Pentium III Compaq servers. The pages were created using Microsoft's Active Server Pages.

Within 12 hours of last Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center in New York, city officials and Stream 57, a company owned by the Greater New York Hospital Association, collaborated to post on the Web the names of people treated for injuries sustained in the attack.

Related Links