The primary goal of the Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS) is to monitor trends in non-specific symptoms of illness at the community level in real time. The ESSS includes emergency department chief complaint data that are categorized into eight syndromes: respiratory, gastrointestinal, fever, asthma, neurological, rash, carbon monoxide, and hypothermia. Since the onset of H1N1, fever syndrome has been used to monitor flu activity. As H1N1 spread nationwide, the need of visualizing flu activity geographically became clear, and urgent.
Objective
The objective of this paper is to describe a map application added to the New York state Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS). The application allows system users to display the geographic distributions, and trends of fever syndrome that was used to monitor seasonal and H1N1 influenza activities.