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research Hong Kong to nearly 40 countries—and infected more than 8,400 people—in a matter of weeks. Eleven percent of its victims died. "The failure of central (public health) agencies to detect and manage SARS was generally attributed to weak disease surveillance mechanisms," the authors write. If officials had received information about the outbreak sooner, they add, the disease could have been contained more quickly. Managing the Next Pandemic IN THE RECENTLY released blockbuster film Conta- gion, a deadly virus spreads around the world within days, killing everyone who is not immune. Entire cities are quarantined, social order breaks down—it's a plot tailor-made for a Hollywood thriller. But according to a recent study, the scenario is all too plausible. Just a handful of infected individuals taking international flights could spread an emerging infectious disease (EID) worldwide within hours. How many people die in such a pandemic depends on how well health officials can identify and respond to its initial signs, say the study's five authors. They call for improved information systems (IS) that incorporate a concept called "loose coupling" to prevent pandemics. The researchers include Yi-Da Chen, a doctoral student in management information systems (MIS) at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Susan Brown, associate professor of MIS at Eller; Hsinchun Chen, professor of MIS and director of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelli- gence Laboratory; Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, associate professor in the department of operations and information sys- tems at the University of Utah's David Eccles School in Salt Lake City; and Chwan-Chuen King, a professor in the Graduate Institute of Epidemiology in the College of Public Health at National Taiwan University in Taipei. The research team examined the world's reaction to the 2003 outbreak of Severely Acute Respiratory Syn- drome, or SARS, in Taiwan. According to reports from the World Health Organization, SARS spread from 66 November/December 2011 BizEd In response to the SARS epidemic, many government agencies dedicated large sums of money to improving IS so that health officials could more quickly identify EIDs. However, the authors argue that because EIDs spread in such complex patterns, current systems still may leave health officials unprepared to prevent a pandemic. The current centralized response sys- tems to outbreaks can send too much data through too narrow a channel, the researchers say. "Public health practitio- ners experience difficulty in dissecting the meaning behind frequent surveil- lance alerts and often feel overwhelmed by the volume of the alerts," they write. As a result, officials could be too slow to respond to the next global health threat. For that reason, the researchers recom- mend a comprehensive response framework that includes both a centralized global system and a "loosely coupled" system for gather- ing, interpreting, and sharing public health data. In information systems, a loosely cou- pled system is one in which each component has little or no knowledge of the other components. In the context of a health crisis, loosely coupled IS would allow local agencies to respond to potential out- breaks before receiving explicit directives from larger national or global organizations. While a centralized global system is critical for large-scale pandemics, the authors believe that loose coupling could increase the likelihood that local clinicians can stop an outbreak before it leaves their regions. Their paper, "Managing emerging infectious diseases with information systems: reconceptualizing outbreak management through the lens of loose coupling," was published in the September issue of Information Systems Research, the journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Hsinchun Chen Susan Brown THOMAS VENEKLASEN