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Ensuring the Week Goes Smoothly - Improving Daily Surveillance Visualization

Description

Real-time syndromic surveillance requires daily surveillance of a range of health data sources. Most real-time data sources from health care systems exhibit large day of the week fluctuations as service provision and patient behaviour varies by day of the week. Regular day of the week effects are further complicated by the occurrence of public holidays (usually 8 per year in England), which can limit the availability of certain services and affect patient behaviour. Simple seven day moving averages fail to provide a smoothed trend around public holidays and can lead to false alarms or potentially delays in detection of outbreaks.

Objective

To develop smoothing techniques for daily syndromic surveillance data that allow for the easier identification of trends and unusual activity independent of day of the week and holiday effects.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on