Ma Haobo

West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause meningitis and encephalitis. Since its discovery in New York City during an encephalitis outbreak in 1999, WNV has become endemic in North America. In the United States, 16,000 human WNV disease cases (including West Nile fever, meningitis, encephalitis, and unspecified clinical illness) and over 600 WNV-related deaths have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control from 46 states. Perennial WNV epidemics occur during summer months, peaking during late August. BioSense Early Event Detection and Situation Awareness System receives daily laboratory test order data feed in HL7 from Laboratory Corporation of America. In this study, test orders were studied for their correlation with WNV activity.

Objective

To determine the feasibility of using BioSense laboratory test order data for West Nile disease surveillance in the United States. 

BioSense currently receives demographic and chief complaint data from more than 360 hospitals and text radiology reports from 36 hospitals. Detection of pneumonia is an important as several Category A bioterrorism diseases as well as avian influenza can manifest as pneumonia. Radiology text reports are often received within 1-2 days and may provide a faster way to identify pneumonia than coded diagnoses. Objective To study the performance of a simple keyword search of radiology reports for identifying pneumonia.

The purposes of this study are to validate a keyword-based text parsing algorithm for identifying fractures and compare radiology results with chief complaint and ICD-9 final diagnoses.