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McMurray Paul

Description

The CDC's BioSense Program receives near real-time health care utilization data from a number of sources, including Department of Defense (DoD) healthcare facilities from around the globe and non-federal hospital emergency departments (EDs) in the US, to support all-hazards surveillance and situation awareness. Following the tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011, the BioSense Program modified its surveillance protocols to monitor: 1) injuries and possible radiation-associated health effects in Japan-based DoD facilities and 2) potential adverse health effects associated with the consumption of potassium iodide (KI), a salt used to prevent injury to the thyroid gland in the event of radiation exposure, among persons attending participating EDs in the US. We present the findings from that enhanced surveillance.

Objective

To demonstrate the utility of the BioSense Program for post-disaster response surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

BioSense is a national system that receives, analyzes, and visualizes electronic health data and makes it available for public health use. In December 2007 CDC added the Influenza Module to the main BioSense application.

 

Objective

This presentation describes the new BioSense Influenza Module, its performance during the 2007-8 influenza season, and modifications for the 2008-9 influenza season.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on
Description

BioSense is a CDC initiative to promote situational awareness through summarizing, analyzing, and presenting health related event information. Among the data sources collected and analyzed through the BioSense application are the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs ambulatory clinic care data. Clinical diagnoses and procedures are quantified, and analytic results are presented and categorized into 94 state and metropolitan areas.

 

Objective

Precise geographic location of health events is a challenging but critical component to determine the likely site of exposure for disease surveillance. This paper describes a method used by BioSense to develop and implement a reasonable set of rules in defining geographic locations of health events.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Analysis of the BioSense data facilitates the identification, tracking, and management of emergent and routine health events, including potential bioterrorism events, injury related incidents and rapidly spreading naturally occurring events (1).  BioSense enhances coordination between all levels of public health and healthcare by providing access to the same data at the same time which can ultimately produce a faster and more coordinated response.  BioSense is a network of networks rather than a stand-alone program. Analysts at the BioIntelligence center (BIC) analyze and track BioSense data activity at a national level and support state and local public health system users (2).

Objective:

BioSense is a national human health surveillance system designed to improve the nationís capabilities for disease detection, monitoring, and real-time health situational awareness.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Since July 2004 the BioSense program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has received data from DoD military and VA outpatient clinics (not in real time). In January 2006 real-time hospital data (e.g. chief complaints and diagnoses) was added. Various diagnoses from all sources are binned into one or more of 11 syndrome categories.

Objective

This paper'­s objective is to compare syndromic categorization of newly acquired real-time civilian hospital data with existing BioSense data sources.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) is a community focused collaboration among federal, state, and local public health agencies and partners for timely exchange of syndromic data. These data, captured in nearly real time, are intended to improve the nation's situational awareness and responsiveness to hazardous events and disease outbreaks. During CDC’s previous implementation of a syndromic surveillance system (BioSense 2), there was a reported lack of transparency and sharing of information on the data processing applied to data feeds, encumbering the identification and resolution of data quality issues. The BioSense Governance Group Data Quality Workgroup paved the way to rethink surveillance data flow and quality. Their work and collaboration with state and local partners led to NSSP redesigning the program’s data flow. The new data flow provided a ripe opportunity for NSSP analysts to study the data landscape (e.g., capturing of HL7 messages and core data elements), assess end-to-end data flow, and make adjustments to ensure all data being reported were processed, stored, and made accessible to the user community. In addition, NSSP extensively documented the new data flow, providing the transparency the community needed to better understand the disposition of facility data. Even with a new and improved data flow, data quality issues that were issues in the past, but went unreported, remained issues in the new data. However, these issues were now identified. The newly designed data flow provided opportunities to report and act on issues found in the data unlike previous versions. Therefore, an important component of the NSSP data flow was the implementation of regularly scheduled standard data quality checks, and release of standard data quality reports summarizing data quality findings.

Objective:

Review the impact of applying regular data quality checks to assess completeness of core data elements that support syndromic surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on