Description
Syndromic Surveillance (SS), traditionally applied to infectious diseases, is more recently being adapted to chronic disease prevention. Its usefulness rests on the large number of diverse individuals visiting emergency rooms with the possibility of real-time monitoring of acute health effects, including effects from environmental events and its potential ability to examine more long-term health effects and trends of chronic diseases on a local level.
Objective:
To create chronic disease categories for emergency department (ED) chief complaint data and evaluate the categories for validity against ED data with discharge diagnoses and hospital discharge data.