The Joint VA/DoD BioSurveillance System for Emerging Biological Threats project seeks to improve situational awareness of the health of VA/DoD populations by combining their respective data. Each system uses a version of the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE); a combined version is being tested. The current effort investigated combining the datasets for disease cluster detection. We compared results of retrospective cluster detection studies using both separate and joined data. — Does combining datasets worsen the rate of background cluster determination?
— Does combining mask clusters detected on the separate datasets?
— Does combining find clusters that the separate datasets alone would miss?
Objective:
We examined the utility of combining surveillance data from the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) for spatial cluster detection.