Lindquist Scott

The University of Washington has been working since 2000 with partners in Washington State to advance bioterrorism (BT) detection and preparedness. This project collects data on patients presenting with influenza-like illnesses and other potentially BT-related syndromes at emergency departments and primary care clinics (Kitsap, Clallam, and Jefferson counties) using a secure automated informatics approach. Local health jurisdiction epidemiologists use a web-based interface to view de-identified data and use a version of CDC’s EARS disease detection algorithms to watch for variances in patterns of diagnoses, volume, time and space as part of the public health real-time disease surveillance system. This processed hospital data is also made available back to the officials and administrators at the reporting hospital.

Objective

To understand GIS issues in a rural-tourban setting and demonstrate limitations of ZIPcode-only approaches compared to census tract and block approaches.

The University of Washington's Center for Public Health Informatics, in collaboration with the Kitsap County Health District and the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, has developed the Peninsula Syndromic Surveillance Information Collection System (SSIC), a complex second-generation [1,2] distributed database system which collects heterogeneous data from three emergency department / urgent care facilities computerized electronic admission and discharge diagnosis data. We transform heterogeneous institution-specific data to a standardized XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format, which is then transmitted to and integrated into a central database. Aberration detection algorithms are used to analyze this data so that public health officials can detect higher-than-usual incidences of the clinical syndromes under surveillance.