BioSense is a national automated surveillance system designed to enhance the nation's capability to rapidly detect and quantify public health emergencies, by accessing and analyzing diagnostic and prediagnostic health data. The BioSense system currently receives near real-time data from more than 540 civilian hospitals, as well as national daily batched data from over 1100 Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs medical facilities. BioSense maps chief complaint and diagnosis data to 11 syndromes and 78 sub-syndromes. This project was spurred by the recent detection of several clusters with chief complaints containing the term “exposure” only some of which map to current BioSense sub-syndromes. BioSense currently does not have a generic “exposure” sub-syndrome.
OBJECTIVE
To identify hospital visits with chief complaints concerning exposures, characterize them, and develop methods for detecting exposure clusters.