Chen J

The American Health Information Community Harmonized Use Case for the Biosurveillance minimum data set (MDS) was implemented to establish data exchange between regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) for accelerating situational awareness through the Health Information Exchange (HIE) Project. However, the completeness, timeliness of the reporting and quality of data elements in the MDS through RHIOs are still unknown and need further validation before we can utilize them for NYSDOH public health surveillance.

Objective

Evaluate the availability, timeliness, and accuracy of MDS data elements received from one RHIO for emergency department (ED), in-patient, and outpatient visits. Compare the characteristics of patients meeting the HIE influenza-like illness definition who were admitted to the hospital or expired versus those discharged home.

The primary goal of the Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS) is to monitor trends in non-specific symptoms of illness at the community level in real time. The ESSS includes emergency department chief complaint data that are categorized into eight syndromes: respiratory, gastrointestinal, fever, asthma, neurological, rash, carbon monoxide, and hypothermia. Since the onset of H1N1, fever syndrome has been used to monitor flu activity. As H1N1 spread nationwide, the need of visualizing flu activity geographically became clear, and urgent.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to describe a map application added to the New York state Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS). The application allows system users to display the geographic distributions, and trends of fever syndrome that was used to monitor seasonal and H1N1 influenza activities.