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Lyme Disease Related Encounters - Connecticut Department of Public Health, April 2019

  • Why the syndrome was created? This syndrome was created to monitor Lyme disease related emergency room visits using regular expressions in R. 
  • Syndromic surveillance system (e.g., ESSENCE, R STUDIO, RODS, etc.) Data collected from Epicenter, but parsed and analysed in R/Rstudio
  • Data sources the syndrome was used on (e.g., Emergency room, EMS, Air Quality, etc.) Emergency room and Urgent Care
  • Fields used to query the data (e.g., Chief Complaint, Discharge Diagnosis, Triage Notes, etc.) Chief Complaint, Initial and Discharge ICD, Triage Notes
  • Any other relevant information: Uses regular expression 'look arounds' that may not be compatible with all types of regex, but will work within R Studio and the 'stringr' package.  In Connecticut we have to filter out references to the towns of Old Lyme and East Lyme.
Syndrome Definition

Chief Complaint Inclusions Regular Expression: (?<!no\shistory\sof\s)(?<!no\shx\sof\s)lyme|bullseye(?=.*rash)|a69\W?20|\blime\sdis

Chief Complaint Exclusions Regular Expression: hx\slyme|hx\sof\slyme|history\sof\slyme

Intial ICD and Discharge ICD inclusions Regular Expression: A69\.20

Triage Note Inclusion Regular Expression:(?<!hx|hx\s|hx\sof\s|history\sof\s)(?<!no\shistory\sof\s)(?<!no\shx\sof\s)(?<!east\s|o)lyme\b|bullseye(?=.*rash)|a69\W?20

Submitting Author Organization
Connecticut Department of Public Health
Submitting Author Email
alexander.senetcky@ct.gov
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