Imholte Sara

Arizona is facing multiple public health threats from arboviral diseases. State and local public health departments are monitoring two mosquito-borne outbreaks within its borders and two in adjacent territories. To prevent transmission, viremic patients must be identified in a timely manner and encouraged to avoid additional mosquito exposure and vector control actions must be implemented. Using traditional surveillance, however, health departments may not be alerted until the laboratory confirms and reports a positive result, which may take up to 14 days after specimen collection. The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) partnered with local public health jurisdictions to enhance traditional arboviral surveillance by incorporating syndromic surveillance.

Objective

To develop a protocol for enhancing traditional arboviral surveillance with syndromic surveillance and to evaluate the protocol for accuracy, effectiveness, and timeliness

One of the greatest hurdles for BioSense Onboarding is the process of validating data received to ensure it contains Data Elements of Interest (DEOI) needed for syndromic surveillance. Efforts to automate this process are critical to meet existing and future demands for facility onboarding requests as well as provide a foundation for data quality assurance efforts. By automating the validation process, BioSense hopes to:

1. Reduce costs associated with the iterative validation process.

2. Improve BioSense response times for assistance with onboarding.

3. Improve documentation to partners about requirements and communicate changes to DEOI.

4. Provide a better foundation for data quality initiatives.

Efforts to improve data validation are being developed in alignment with BioSense future initiatives and will apply to both BioSense, Essence and other BioSense program applications.

BioSense Onboarding identified critical success factors by participating in ISDS workgroup initiatives for Onboarding and Data Quality and soliciting feedback from key jurisdictional partners. These critical success factors include; improved documentation, access to raw data, and faster validation response time.

Objective

This session will inform the BioSense Community about data validation advancements implemented this past year as well as future plans to improve the BioSense validation process to achieve emergency department representativeness goals.