The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention BioSense has developed chief complaint (CC) and ICD9 sub syndrome classifiers for the major syndromes for early event detection and situational awareness. The prevalence of these sub-syndromes in the emergency department population and the performance of these CC classifiers have been little studied. Chart reviews have been used in the past to study this type of question but because of the large number of cases to review, the labor involved would be prohibitive. Therefore, we used an ICD9 code classifier for a syndrome as a surrogate by chart reviews to estimate the performance of a CC classifier.
Objective
To determine the prevalence of the sub-syndromes based on the ICD9 classifiers, and to determine the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of CC classifiers for the sub-syndromes associated with the respiratory and gastrointestinal syndromes using the ICD9 classifier as the criterion standard.