Facing public health threats of bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases (EID), the traditional passive surveillance system is not efficient and outmoded. Evidences reveal that several newly developed syndromic surveillance system (SSS) in different countries can provide an active, powerful, timely, and effective epidemiological investigation. Using this SSS, we can find non-specific symptoms, and set up baseline clinical data and epidemic threshold. Due to English barriers and standardized language problem in the past, we initiated to develop an emergency department-based syndromic surveillance system (ED-SSS) using clinical data involving both check-list format chief complaints (CoCo) and International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) that best fit the situations in Taiwan.
Objective
The aims of this study are to set up a SSS for detecting newly EID outbreaks early using more standardized information of triage CoCo of hospital emergency department in metropolitan Taipei City to (1) break through Chinese language barrier; (2) investigate its feasibility to detect influenza like illness (ILI) outbreaks using integrated clinical and epidemiological information installed within information technology system; and (3) compare the sensitivity, specificity, and kappa value of ILI between ICD-9 and CoCo.