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Localized Surveillance: A Fresh Perspective for Regional Syndromic Surveillance

Description

Recent efforts to share syndromic surveillance data have focused on developing national systems, namely BioSense 2.01 . The problems with creating and implementing national systems, such as legal issues, difficulties in standardizing syndrome definitions, data quality, and different objectives, are well documented. In contrast, several local health departments have successfully shared data and analyses with each other, primarily during emergency events. The benefits of locally-driven data sharing include: (1) faster dissemination of data and analyses that have been created by those who understand the nuances of their own data, (2) easier process of standardizing syndrome definitions, (3) quickly designing appropriate analyses for the event, (4) smaller group of partners for consensus-building, and (5) ultimately improved timeliness in detection of public health events. The strategies used to share data and analyses between local and state health departments during planned and unplanned events may be informative to national systems.

Objective

To outline successful strategies for regional data-sharing and discuss how these strategies can be applied to other regions.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on