The Florida Department of Health electronically receives hospital emergency department (ED) data from 180 EDs located in 54 of its 67 counties through its Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL). Florida EDs have begun to offer self-registration options to patients, which include ED self check-in kiosks, and pre-visit registration smartphone applications and websites. ESSENCE-FL receives ED data from multiple hospitals that use these patient self-registration methods. To date, limited investigation has been carried out to determine the impact of these self-registration methods on the data submitted to ESSENCE-FL. This project investigates and describes how SS data are affected by these options and provides possible best practices for identifying and analyzing these data.
Objective
To assess the effect of patient self-registration methods in hospital emergency departments on data in a syndromic surveillance (SS) system and provide suggestions for analysis of these data.