Syndromic surveillance has traditionally been used by public health to supplement mandatory disease reporting. The use of chief complaints as a data source is common for early event detection. Though some public health syndromic surveillance systems allow individual hospitals to view their own data through a web interface, many ICPs have the experience and knowledge-base to conduct their own surveillance and analysis internally. Additionally, they often have interests specific to their hospital which may motivate them to conduct additional syndromic surveillance projects themselves. Lastly, in many cases, ICPs are better able to investigate problems with chief complaint syndrome categorization and aberrations within their own facility before notification of public health staff. A good understanding of the foundation of syndromic surveillance by hospital ICPs can be extremely beneficial when paired with public health to investigate possible cases and outbreaks. ICPs at Greenville Hospital System (GHS), composed of 1110 beds, a level I trauma center with an average of 85,000 visits per year plus three smaller outlying emergency rooms, has had interest in syndromic surveillance for many years and collected data manually for trend analysis using Microsoft Excel to monitor chief complaint data since August 2003.
Objective
Demonstrate the use and benefit to hospital-based infection control practitioners (ICP) of chief complaint data for syndromic surveillance in partnership with public health to assist with traditional public health disease investigations.