The New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) receives daily ED data from 49 of NYC’s 52 hospitals, representing approximately 95% of ED visits citywide. Chief complaint (CC) is categorized into syndrome groupings using text recognition of symptom key-words and phrases. Hospitals are not required to notify the DOHMH of any changes to procedures or health information systems (HIS). Previous work noticed that CC word count varied over time within and among EDs. The variations seen in CC word count may affect the quality and type of data received by the DOHMH, thereby affecting the ability to detect syndrome visits consistently.
Objective
To identify changes in emergency department (ED) syndromic surveillance data by analyzing trends in chief complaint (CC) word count; to compare these changes to coding changes reported by EDs; and to examine how these changes might affect the ability of syndromic surveillance systems to identify syndromes in a consistent manner.