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Evaluation of Syndromic Surveillance

Description

Electronic epi-biosurveillance presents an opportunity to provide real-time disease surveillance alerts from remote areas to central disease management units, to rapidly decrease reporting times for reportable diseases, and to enable appropriate response scenarios to be put in place in a timely manner. Over the past year, with the support of GEIS and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, we have piloted an electronic disease reporting system in four sites in the Cameroon military and evaluated these surveillance efforts, to understand how such infrastructure may impact this resource-limited setting.

Objective

Pilot and evaluate an electronic disease surveillance system in the Cameroon military and assess the capabilities of this system to fulfill reporting and early warning requirements.

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Description

The International Health Regulations were revised in 2005 to adapt to increasing diversity of emerging health threats, globalization, changing trends in trade and travel, and the need for collective effort to address the international spread of disease. States Parties to the Regulations have committed to meeting their obligations within a certain timeframe, including achieving the minimum IHR core capacities throughout their territories. By May 2013, over 100 WHO Member States (MS) reported not having met their national IHR core capacity requirements. Many MS need support in making realistic estimates of their activities, plans and associated costs in a standardized way to support planning and advocacy for building capacity to meet IHR (2005) requirements.

Objective

To support national decision makers in estimating the costs for closing identified gaps in meeting the national core capacity building requirements of the International Health Regulations (IHR [2005]), including start-up and operating costs.

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Description

Co-financed by the European Commission through the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers, the European Triple-S project (Syndromic Surveillance Survey, Assessment towards Guidelines for Europe) was launched in 2010 for a 3-year period and includes 24 organizations in 13 countries. Numerous European countries have created SyS systems. These systems analyze and report their SyS findings to local, regional or national public-health authorities in accordance with their national priorities. But the country outputs are not systematically reported and compared at the EU level, hindering a global overview and interpretation of the health situations observed in different regions or countries in Europe. The Triple-S project has thus proposed a strategy for coordinating the comparison and interpretation of SyS information across Europe to produce a Europe-wide epidemiological picture of a given health event in a timely manner, and thereby support coordinated public-health action.

Objective

To present a proposal for coordinating syndromic surveillance (SyS) systems operated by European countries and for comparing findings from these systems.

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Description

The importance transmitting clinical information to public health for disease surveillance is well-documented. Conventional reporting processes require health care providers to complete paper-based notifiable condition reports which are transmitted by fax and mail to public health agencies. These processes result in incomplete reports, inconsistencies in reporting frequencies among different diseases and reporting delays as well as time-consuming follow-up by public health to get needed information. One strategy to address these issues is to electronically pre-populate report forms with available clinical, lab and patient data to streamline reporting workflows, increase data completeness and, ultimately, provide access to more timely and accurate surveillance data for public health organizations. Prior to implementing an intervention that includes using pre-populated forms, we conducted interviews in clinical and public health settings to identify the barriers and facilitators to adopting and utilizing the forms and their potential impact on workflow and perceived burden. These interviews are a component of a larger mixed methods evaluation that will triangulate pre- and post-intervention quantitative data quality measures with qualitative results.

Objective

Introduction of new health information technologies can produce unanticipated consequences on existing user behaviors, workflow, etc. Prior to implementing a public health reporting intervention, we conducted a series of interviews regarding workflow and perceptions of task burden with respect to notifiable condition reporting.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) electronically receives both urgent care center (UCC) data and hospital emergency department (ED) data from health care facilities in 43 of its 67 counties through its Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL). Each submitted record is assigned to one of eleven ESSENCE Syndrome categories based on parsing of chief complaint data. The UCC data come from 22 urgent care centers located in Central Florida, and the ED data come from 161 hospitals located across the state. Traditionally, the data from these two sources are grouped and viewed together. To date, limited investigation has been carried out on the validity of grouping data from UCCS and EDs in ESSENCE-FL. This project will investigate and describe the differences between the data received from these two sources and provide best practices for grouping and analyzing these data sources.

Objective

To identify best practices for grouping emergency department and urgent care data in a syndromic surveillance system.

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Description

The IDSP is the key indicator based surveillance system in the country to fulfill the core surveillance and response functions requirement under the IHR–2005. Periodic reviews of the IDSP in the country have shown that it has been ineffective in meeting its main objective of disease control in the country. Efforts are required to systematically identify and adequately address the factors affecting the performance of IDSP for it to achieve its objectives and ensure compliance to the IHR-2005 requirements for national and global health security.

Objective

The goal of this study was to assess and review the factors (core and supplementary surveillance system attributes and functions) affecting the outcome of the Integrated Disease Surveillance Project (IDSP) in the state of Andhra Pradesh, in India.

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Description

Active CCHF natural foci were reported in 3 southern regions of Kazakhstan. The CCHF virus reservoir and vectors are ixodic ticks. 3-12 human CCHF cases occur per year; infection occurs through tick bites and CCHF patient blood contact. Prediction of the CCHF epidemiological situation is extremely difficult due to a variety of natural and social factors that directly or indirectly influence development of CCHF outbreaks. Kazakhstan has conducted research of EIDSS software application for processing an array of epidemiological data and situation prediction in certain regions of Kazakhstan. Objective: Evaluation of accuracy of the population epidemic risks prognosis for 2013 in the natural foci of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) in the Republic of Kazakhstan with application of Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance System (EIDSS) version 4.

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Description

The utility of specific sources of data for surveillance, and the quality of those data, are an ingoing issue in public health(1). Syndromic surveillance is typically conducted as a secondary use of data collected as part of routine clinical practice, and as such the data can be of high quality for the clinical use but of lower quality for the purpose of surveillance. A major data quality issue with surveillance data is that of timeliness. Data used in surveillance typically arrive as a periodic process, inherently creating a delay in the availability of the data for surveillance purposes. Surveillance data are often collected from multiple sources, each with their own processes and delays, creating a situation where the data available for surveillance are accrued piecemeal.

Objective

This abstract discusses the quality issues identified in using Distribute. From 2006 to 2012, the ISDS ran Distribute (2), a surveillance system for monitoring influenza like illness (ILI) and gastroenteritis (GI) ED visits on a nationwide basis. This system collected counts for ILI, GI and total ED visits, aggregated to the level of jurisdiction. The primary data quality issue faced with the Distribute system was that of timeliness due to accrual lag; variable delays in the receipt of surveillance data from sources by jurisdictions together with variable delays in the reporting of aggregate data from jurisdictions to Distribute resulted in data which accrued over time(3).

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Description

One criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of a surveillance system is the system’s positive predictive value. To our knowledge few studies have described the positive predictive value of syndromic surveillance signals for naturally occurring conditions of public health importance.

 

Objective

We evaluated the positive predictive value of signals detected by our syndromic surveillance system.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Objective

To study if syndromic surveillance would have an added value over existing surveillance systems, we retrospectively evaluated whether known trends in respiratory pathogens are reflected in medical registrations in the Netherlands when using respiratory syndrome groupings.

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