Evolution of a Syndromic Surveillance Case Definition

In North Carolina, select hospital emergency departments have been submitting data since 2003 for use in syndromic surveillance. These data are collected, stored, and parsed into syndrome categories by the North Carolina Emergency Department Database. The fever with rash illness syndrome is designed to capture smallpox cases. This syndrome was created as a combination of the separate fever and rash syndromes proposed by the consensus recommendations of the CDC’s Working Group on Syndrome Groups.

Objective 

This paper describes the construction of a syndromic surveillance case definition and a test for its ability to capture the appropriate syndromic cases.