Monitoring heat-related illness (HRI) is a public health priority in Maricopa County, Arizona. Since 2006, Maricopa County Department of Public Health has utilized data from hospital discharges, medical examiner preliminary reports, and death certificates to quantify heat-related morbidity and mortality, but these surveillance methods take time. Identifying HRI more quickly would improve situational awareness and allow public health officials to launch a more immediate response to extreme heat events. Arizona began using BioSense 2.0 in July 2014 to collect chief complaint and diagnosis data for syndromic surveillance. The BioSense Front End Application uses a standard query definition for HRI (i.e., “Heat, excessive”), but this definition may perform differently for each jurisdiction.

Objective

To evaluate the pre-defined “Heat, excessive” query in BioSense 2.0 using recent Maricopa County, Arizona data; quantify the number of cases retrieved by the query due to chief complaint terms rather than clinical diagnosis; and provide a list of terms to be considered for exclusion criteria while developing a custom query