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Finding Time-of-Arrival Clusters of Exposure-Related Visits to Emergency Departments in Contiguous Hospital Groups

Description

Time-of-arrival (TOA) surveillance methodology consists of identifying clusters of patients arriving to a hospital emergency department (ED) with similar complaints within a short temporal interval. TOA monitoring of ED visit data is currently conducted by the Florida Department of Health at the county level for multiple subsyndromes [1]. In 2011, North Carolina's NC DETECT system and CDC's Biosense Program collaborated to enhance and adapt this capability for 10 hospital-based Public Health Epidemiologists (PHEs), an ED-based monitoring group established in 2003, for North Carolina's largest hospital systems. At the present time, PHE hospital systems include coverage for approximately 44% of the statewide general/acute care hospital beds and 32% of all emergency department visits statewide. We present findings from TOA monitoring in one hospital system.

Objective

To describe collaborations between North Carolina Division of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) implementing time-of-arrival (TOA) surveillance to monitor for exposure-related visits to emergency departments (ED) in small groups of North Carolina hospitals.

Submitted by elamb on