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Pavlin Julie

Description

Effective public health response to emerging infectious diseases, natural disasters, and bioterrorism requires access to real-time, accurate information on disease patterns and healthcare utilization. The ESSENCE surveillance system in use by the Department of Defense (DoD) relies primarily on outpatient clinical impression diagnosis, which accurately characterize broad disease syndromes but may not be sufficient for monitoring specific diseases. DoD outpatient military treatment facilities perform nearly 500,000 microbiology laboratory tests annually. Initiated electronically, the ordered test is recorded immediately; most provide specific results in 24 to 72 hours and may prove useful for monitoring population health. Although a syndrome classification has been developed for laboratory tests, the classification cannot be applied directly to the DoD data and no previous study has validated the use of automated laboratory test orders for syndromic surveillance.

 

Objective

To evaluate the association between military microbiology laboratory test orders and infectious disease patterns.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

58 medical licensure boards require between 12 and 50 hours of Continuing Medical Education (CME) for re-licensure of physicians. 28 states as well as Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Mariana Islands, require continuing nursing education (CNE) for nursing re-licensure, with requirements varying from 5 hours per year to 45 hours every 3 years. Continuing education requirements may include self-directed educational programs, academic education, or research and professional activities. To the best of our knowledge, although there are online public health preparedness programs and journal articles that provide continuing education credits, there is no currently available online course on syndromic surveillance available for CME or CNE.

 

Objective

The Education and Training Committee of the International Society for Disease Surveillance is developing an introductory online CME curriculum in syndromic surveillance for physicians and other health practitioners. This curriculum would also be available for public health practitioners new to syndromic surveillance. The goal of the curriculum is to provide an introductory knowledge of syndromic surveillance for interested practitioners and stimulate healthcare provider cooperation and involvement with syndromic surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The revised International Health Regulations (IHR) have expanded traditional infectious disease notification to include surveillance diseases of international importance, including emerging infectious diseases.  However, there are no clearly established guidelines for how countries should conduct this surveillance, which types of syndromes should be reported, nor any means for enforcement.  The commonly established concept of syndromic surveillance in developed regions encompasses the use of pre-diagnostic information in a near real time fashion for further investigation for public health action.  Syndromic surveillance is widely used in North America and Europe, and is typically thought of as a highly complex, technology driven automated tool for early detection of outbreaks.  Nonetheless, applications of syndromic surveillance using technology appropriate for the setting are being used worldwide to augment traditional surveillance, and may enhance compliance with the revised IHR.

Objective:

To review applications of syndromic surveillance in developing countries

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Lessons learned from the 2009 influenza pandemic have driven many changes in the standards and practices of respiratory disease surveillance worldwide. In response to the needs for timely information sharing of emerging respiratory pathogens (1), the DoD Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) collaborated with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) to develop an Internet-based data management system known as the Respiratory Disease Dashboard (RDD). The goal of the RDD is to provide the AFHSC global respiratory disease surveillance network a centralized system for the monitoring and tracking of lab-confirmed respiratory pathogens, thereby streamlining the data reporting process and enhancing the timeliness for detection of potential pandemic threats. This system consists of a password-protected internet portal that allows users to directly input respiratory specimen data and visualize data on an interactive, global map. Currently, eight DoD partner laboratories are actively entering respiratory pathogen data into the RDD, encompassing specimens from sentinel sites in eleven countries: Cambodia, Colombia, Kenya, Ecuador, Egypt, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uganda, and the United States. A user satisfaction survey was conducted to guide further development of the RDD and to support other disease surveillance efforts at the AFHSC.

Objective

Evaluate the user experience of a novel electronic disease reporting and analysis system deployed across the DoD global laboratory surveillance network.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

EEBS’s that use near real-time information from the Internet are an increasingly important source of intelligence for public health organizations. However, there has not been a systematic assessment of EEBS evaluations, which could identify uncertainties about current systems and guide EEBS development to effectively exploit digital information for surveillance.

 

Objective

To assess evaluations of electronic event-based biosurveillance systems (EEBS’s) and define priorities for EEBS evaluations.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

The Joint VA/DoD BioSurveillance System for Emerging Biological Threats project seeks to improve situational awareness of the health of VA/DoD populations by combining their respective data. Each system uses a version of the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE); a combined version is being tested. The current effort investigated combining the datasets for disease cluster detection. We compared results of retrospective cluster detection studies using both separate and joined data. — Does combining datasets worsen the rate of background cluster determination?

— Does combining mask clusters detected on the separate datasets?

— Does combining find clusters that the separate datasets alone would miss?

Objective:

We examined the utility of combining surveillance data from the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) for spatial cluster detection.

 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

An objective of the Joint VA/DoD BioSurveillance System for Emerging Biological Threats project is to improve situational awareness of the health of combined VA and DoD populations. DoD and VA both use versions of the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE). With a retrospective outpatient data collection available, we analyzed relative coverage and timeliness of the two systems to understand potential benefits of a joint system.

Objective

We determined the utility and effective methodology for combin- ing patient record information from the Departments of Veterans Af- fairs (VA) and Defense (DoD) health surveillance systems. 

Submitted by jababrad@indiana.edu on
Description

The US Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that after October 1, 2015, all HIPAA covered entities must transition from using International Classification of Diseases version 9 (ICD- 9) codes to using version 10 (ICD-10) codes (www.cms.gov). This will impact public health surveillance entities that receive, analyze, and report ICD-9 encoded data. Public health agencies will need to modify existing database structures, extraction rules, and messaging guides, as well as syndrome definitions and underlying analytics, statistical methodologies, and business rules. Implementation challenges include resources, funding, workforce capabilities, and time constraints for code translation and syndrome reclassification.

Objective

To describe the process undertaken to translate syndromic surveillance syndromes and sub-syndromes from ICD-9 diagnostic codes to ICD-10 codes and how these translations can be used to improve syndromic surveillance practice.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

The National Strategy for Biosurveillance promotes a national effort to improve early detection and enable ongoing situational awareness of all-hazards threats. Implicit in the Strategy’s implementation plan is the need to upgrade capabilities and integrate multiple disparate data sources, including more complete electronic health record (EHR) data into future biosurveillance capabilities. Thus, new biosurveillance applications are clearly needed. Praedico™ is a next generation biosurveillance application that incorporates cloud computing technology, a Big Data platform utilizing MongoDB as a data management system, machine-learning algorithms, geospatial and advanced graphical tools, multiple EHR domains, and customizable social media streaming from public health-related sources, all within a user friendly interface.

Objective

The purpose of our study was to conduct an initial assessment of the biosurveillance capabilities of a new software application called Praedico™ and compare results obtained from previous queries with the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE).

 

Submitted by Magou on