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.