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Rennick Marcus

Previous reports have demonstrated the media’s influence on ED visits in situations such as dramatized acetaminophen overdose, media report of celebrity suicides, television public announcements for early stroke care and cardiac visits following President Clinton’s heart surgery. No previous study has demonstrated the influence of media-publicized trauma on ED visits. On 16 March 2009, the actress Natasha Richardson suffered a traumatic brain injury leading to her death on 18 March; these events were widely publicized by national news sources. The health departments of New York City, Boston, Duval County and Seattle monitor ED visits daily, and capture 95, 100, 100 and 95% of all ED visits, respectively. The data collected include basic demographic information, chief complaint and in some cases ICD-9 diagnosis codes.

Objective

This study describes an increase in head trauma-related visits to emergency departments (ED) in New York City, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Duval County, Florida; and Seattle, Washington following the widespread media coverage of actress Natasha Richardson’s head injury and subsequent fatal epidural hematoma.

Referenced File
Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Previous reports have demonstrated the media’s influence on emergency departments (ED) visits in situations such as dramatized acetaminophen overdose, media report of celebrity suicides, television public announcements for early stroke care and cardiac visits following President Clinton’s heart surgery. No previous study has demonstrated the influence of media-publicized trauma on ED visits. On 16 March 2009, the actress Natasha Richardson suffered a traumatic brain injury leading to her death on 18 March; these events were widely publicized by national news sources. The health departments of New York City, Boston, Duval County and Seattle monitor ED visits daily, and capture 95, 100, 100 and 95% of all ED visits, respectively. The data collected include basic demographic information, chief complaint and in some cases ICD-9 diagnosis codes.

 

Objective

This study describes an increase in head trauma-related visits to ED in New York City, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Duval County, Florida; and Seattle, Washington following the widespread media coverage of actress Natasha Richardson’s head injury and subsequent fatal epidural hematoma.

Referenced File
Submitted by hparton on

The burden of asthma on the youngest children in Boston is largely characterized through hospitalizations and self-report surveys. Hospitalization rates are highest in Black and Hispanic populations under age five. A study of children living in Boston public housing showed significant risk factors, including obesity and pest infestation, with less than half of the study population being prescribed daily medication.

Information on asthma visits for children 5 years old or younger was requested by the Boston Public Health Commission Community Initiatives Bureau. The information is being used to establish a baseline for an integrated Healthy Homes Program that includes pest management and lead abatement. There is limited experience in using syndromic surveillance data for chronic disease program planning.

 

Objective

The objective of this study is to report on the use of syndromic surveillance data to describe seasonal patterns of asthma and health inequities among Boston residents, age five and under.

Referenced File
Submitted by hparton on

Marcus Rennick, Epidemiologist with the Marion County Public Health Department (WV), provides an overview/training on the BioSense System.

 

Time Overview:

(45 minutes) Syndromic Surveillance and BioSense Overview

(90 minutes) Hands-on BioSense Tutorial

(20 minutes) Introduction and hands-on to other ways to access the data than just the front end application

(20 minutes) Resources and Community Support

Submitted by elamb on

In May of 2001, Boston released a strategic transportation plan to improve bicycle access and safety. [1] According to the Boston Transportation Department, ridership has increased 122% between 2007 and 2009. [2] A collaborative public health and public safety task force was initiated in 2010 to foster a safe and healthy bicycling environment.

Objective

To quantify the injury burden and identify possible risk factors using bicycle related injury (BRI) visits at Boston emergency departments (ED).

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Collaborative relationships between academicians and public health practitioners are necessary to ensure that methodologies created in the research setting translate into practice. One barrier to forging these collaborations is restrictions on the sharing and availability of public health surveillance data; therefore, most academics with expertise in method development cannot access 'real world' surveillance data with which to evaluate their approaches. The ISDS Technical Conventions Committee was established in 2013 to facilitate and expedite the development, evaluation, and implementation of technical methods for public health surveillance. The purpose of the committee is to bridge a long-standing gap between technical challenges in public health practice and solution developers needing both understanding of these challenges and representative data.

Objective

The purpose of this panel is to facilitate the dissemination of surveillance-related use cases by public health practitioners with accompanying benchmark datasets to method developers. The panel will present practitioners' experiences with preparing patient-level emergency department data sets to accompany a use case submitted to the ISDS Technical Conventions Committee.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

Inter-jurisdictional data sharing can enhance disease surveillance capabilities for local, state, regional and national public health situational awareness and response. BioSense 2.0, a cloud-based computing platform for syndromic surveillance, provides participating local, state and federal health jurisdictions with the ability to share aggregated data; a functionality that is easily activated by selecting an administrative checkbox within the BioSense application. Checking the data-sharing box, however, is a considerable decision that comes with benefits and consequences. On May 20-21, 2013, nine city, county, and state public health department jurisdictions (mainly from the mid-western region of the U.S.) met to explore data sharing for Heat Related Illness (HRI) surveillance using BioSense 2.0. During the workshop, all participants agreed to share data (using the BioSense 2.0 front-end application) in real-time to investigate HRI trends in regional populations during May-August 2012, evaluated HRI case-definitions, and documented benefits and barriers to inter-jurisdictional data sharing. The workshop was convened by ISDS, in collaboration with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), with the support of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Staff from BioSense programmatic and technical teams were also present for the workshop.

Objective

Build upon the findings of a Regional Data Sharing workshop with the larger surveillance community to more clearly describe the benefits, barriers, and needs for data sharing on the BioSense 2.0 platform.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

The incidence of and hospitalizations for SSTI have steadily increased over the last decade in the United States, primarily due to the emergence and spread of community acquired Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). The ED is a common site for SSTI treatment and serves populations not captured by traditional surveillance, including the homeless and uninsured. The use of near real-time syndromic surveillance within the ED to detect unusual activity for further public health investigation has been used to augment traditional infectious disease surveillance. However, the use of this approach for monitoring local epidemiologic trends in SSTI presentation where laboratory data are not available, has not previously been described.

 

Objective

We sought to describe the epidemiology of emergency department (ED) visits for skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI) in an urban area with diverse neighborhood populations using syndromic surveillance system data for the time period from 2007-2011. Our aims were threefold: to demonstrate a proof of concept using syndromic surveillance for SSTI surveillance in the absence of laboratory data, to estimate the burden of ED visits associated with SSTI, and to determine potential geographic “hotspots” for these infections.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Public health is at a precipice of increasing demand for the consumption and analysis of large amounts of disparate data, the centralization of local and state IT offices, and the compartmentalization of programmatic technology solutions. Public health informatics needs differ across programmatic areas, but may have commonalities across jurisdictions. Initial development of the PHCP was launched with the goal of providing a shared infrastructure for state and local jurisdictions enabling the development of interoperable systems and distributed analytical methods with common sources of data. The PHCP is being designed to leverage recent successes with cloud-based technology in public health.

Success of the PHCP is dependent on the involvement of state and local public health jurisdictions in the transparent development and future direction of the platform. Equally critical to success is the selection of appropriate technology, consideration of various governance structures, and full understanding of the legal implications of a shared platform model.

Objective

To update the public health practice community on the continuing development of the Public Health Community Platform (PHCP).

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The benefits of inter-jurisdictional data sharing have been touted as a hallmark of BioSense 2.0, a cloud-based computing platform for syndromic surveillance. A key feature of the BioSense 2.0 platform is the ability to share data across jurisdictions with a standardized interface. Jurisdictions can easily share their data with others by selecting data sharing partners from a list of participating jurisdictions. Technically the process is simple, however there are several other considerations (discussed herein) to be taken into account before and after deciding to share data with the larger BioSense community. This green paper is a continuation of several discussions stemming from a workshop hosted by the International Society of Disease Surveillance (ISDS) in collaboration with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), with the support of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This initial workshop brought together epidemiologists from city, county and state public health departments primarily located in the US Health and Human Services Region 5. The workshop documented (Appendix 1) a variety of known benefits to data sharing, including:

• Cross-border case-finding

• Identifying patterns or trends (local, state, regional, federal)

• Emergency preparedness planning and partner notification

• Estimating an end to an event, based on declining trends in neighboring areas

• Mutual aid

• Ensuring national situational awareness for federal partners

• Hypothesis generation and testing

• Retrospective analysis to improve public health practice Members of this workshop composed an open letter to the BioSense Governance Group (Appendix 2) reporting on the top priorities and suggestions for functionality and documentation that would support data sharing among regional partners. Several members of the workshop coordinated a roundtable discussion at the ISDS 2013 annual conference (Appendix 3).

The annual ISDS conference attracts members across disciplines including practical epidemiologists, statisticians, researchers, informaticians and academic scholars. The objective of the roundtable was to open the conversation to the wider surveillance community and find potential solutions to the three primary barriers to data sharing originally identified by the workshop: legal/ethical concerns; unknown quality of the shared data; and the need for more granular (user role-based) sharing.

Objective

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the general and breakout group discussions facilitated by the roundtable members. This paper does not make any specific policy recommendations, however, we intend for the feedback captured in this document to lead to improvements in the BioSense 2.0 platform and application. The goal is to increase meaningful inter-jurisdictional data sharing by identifying existing barriers and user-generated solutions.

Referenced File
Submitted by uysz on
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