One objective of public health surveillance is detecting disease outbreaks by looking for changes in the disease occurrence, so that control measures can be implemented and the spread of disease minimized. For this purpose, the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) employs the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). The current problem was spawned by a laborintensive process at the FDOH: authentic outbreaks were detected by epidemiologists inspecting ESSENCE time series and derived event lists. The corresponding records indicated that patients arrived at an ED within a short interval, often less than 30minutes. The time-of-arrival (TOA) task was to develop and automate a capability to detect events with clustered patient arrival times at the hospital level for a list of subsyndrome categories of concern to the monitoring counties.
Objective
This presentation discusses the approach and results of collaboration to enable a solution of a hospital TOA monitoring problemin syndromic surveillance applied to public health data at the hospital level for county monitoring.