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General - ISDS

Description

To identify the disciplines and journal titles of surveillance-related publications from a wide range of indexed repositories and to draw attention to the publication repository created by the ISDS Research Committee.

Introduction

The ISDS Research Committee (RC) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in a wide range of topics related to disease surveillance. The RC hosts a literature review process that results in a permanent repository1 of relevant journal articles; some of which are presented in bi-monthly calls/webinars that provide a forum for discussion and author engagement.2 The webinars have led to workgroups and society-wide events, boosted interest in ISDS, the annual conference, and fostered networking among members and guests. Since 2007, the RC has identified and classified published articles using an automated search method with the aim of progressing ISDS’s mission of advancing the science and practice of disease surveillance by fostering collaboration and increasing awareness of current advances in the field of surveillance. In 2012 the RC refined the method of automated literature retrieval resulting in increases in relevant articles identified. The RC literature review efforts have provided an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration and have resulted in a repository of 1920 articles from March 2012-August 2014 (2012=37.4% of articles in the repository, 2013=35.1%, 2014=27.5%).

 

Submitted by aising on
Description

The mission of the ISDS TCC is to bridge the gap between the analytic needs of public health practitioners and the expertise of researchers from other fields for the enhancement of disease surveillance, including situational awareness of chronic as well as infectious threats and follow-up activities such as case linkage and contact tracing. Committee activities to achieve this mission are identifying practical use cases, refining technical specifications in open forums, obtaining benchmark datasets for controlled dissemination, validating candidate methods, and sharing method documentation. In its first 2 years, the TCC has worked on three use cases and assisted with development of data use agreements to permit posting of benchmark datasets, http://www.syndromic.org/ communities/technical-conventions. Recent polling of the Biosense User Group indicated widespread interest in developing additional use cases. The proposed panel is intended to focus on practical applications of common interest, refine the use case development and dissemination process, and foster global interest in this process.

Objective

The main objective is to broaden the collection of use cases developed by the ISDS Technical Conventions Committee (TCC) to enhance effective collaboration between public health practice and analyst researchers in various disciplines and institutions. Panellists will present and motivate use case concepts including requirements for practical solution methods. Component objectives are to refine the presented use cases and to stimulate formation of new ones at local, state, and national levels.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was promoted with two goals: expanding health insurance coverage and reducing healthcare costs. Expanded coverage is expected to partially reduce costs. Emergency department (ED) visits are costlier than comparable primary care physician visits. If uninsured patients use the local ED more often than insured patients with comparable conditions, insuring them may change usage and lower costs. Some reports in the literature do not fit this model of ED usage. In one study, nonurgent ED visits were mainly the result of patient uncertainty about the severity of their condition. While trained medical personnel distinguished urgent and nonurgent cases after the fact, initial presentations were similar. In Oregon, an expansion of Medicaid increased health insurance coverage; ED usage increased rather than decreased. Thus, the motivating narrative about insurance coverage and ED usage informing the ACA may not be the complete story. Reduction of hospital readmissions is also expected to cut costs under the ACA. Hospital process improvements are expected to realize this reduction. Recently it was reported that up to 60% of hospital readmissions are predicted by patient demographics, raising questions about how much control a hospital has over its readmission rate. This research will examine whether data collected via syndromic surveillance can corroborate these findings.

Objective

To determine if data collected for syndromic surveillance can inform policy questions related to emergency department utilization and inpatient readmission.

 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

The Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) application has been used to build and manage online surveys and databases in academic research settings. Public health agencies have begun to use REDCap to manage disease outbreak data. In addition to survey and database development, and data management and analysis, REDCap allows users to track data manipulation and user activity, automate export procedures for data downloads, and use ad hoc reporting tools and advanced features, such as branching logic, file uploading, and calculated fields. REDCap supports HIPAA compliance through userbased permissions and audit trails. These additional capabilities may provide an advantage over commonly used outbreak management tools such as Epi Info and Microsoft Access. The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) has not used REDCap to date. Prior to adopting this web-based application, an evaluation was conducted to assess how REDCap may facilitate outbreak data management.

Objective

To evaluate the use of the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) application to manage outbreak data at the local, state, and multi-jurisdictional level.

 

Submitted by Magou on

On May 28th, 2009, the ISDS Research and Public Health Practice Committees hosted a joint panel with the goal of bringing current challenges faced by public health practitioners to the attention of the research community at large. Members of both Committees expressed concern that much current research in disease surveillance has little application for public health practitioners. With an increasing emphasis on health information technology and exchange, public health practitioners need relevant, understandable analytic tools to manage information and make it useful.

This webinar will provide an overview of game-based tools for surveillance training and technology evaluation. The philosophy and methods of “serious gaming” will be presented through case studies and interactive examples.

Panelists

Timothy Dasey, PhD, Group Leader, Chemical and Biological Defense Systems Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratories

Date and Time

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Host

ISDS Public Health Practice and Research Committees

Description

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) will hold its thirteenth annual conference in Philadelphia on December 10th and 11th, 2014.  The society’s mission is to improve population health by advancing the science and practice of disease surveillance, and the annual conference advances this mission by bringing together practitioners and researchers from multiple fields involved in disease surveillance, including public health, epidemiology, health policy, biostatistics and mathematical modeling, informatics and computer science. This year the conference received a record number of abstract submissions (267), from 33 countries. We accepted 102 abstracts for oral presentations, along with 40 lightning talks and 100 posters.

Submitted by Magou on

Two public health practitioners will describe their experiences collaborating with University researchers to develop and evaluate new informatics tools for public health. They will identify factors that led to the successes and failures in those collaborations.

Panelists

Joe Gibson, MPH, PhD, Director of Epidemiology - Marion County Public Health Department

Arthur Davidson, MD, MPH, Director of Public Health and Informatics - Denver Health

Date and Time

Whether you are planning on attending the ISDS Annual Conference for the first time this December or you have been attending since 2002, the ISDS Scientific Program Committee invites you to discover the 2012 ISDS Conference! This webinar will highlight the abstract submission process, new abstract submission types, and the Pre-Conference Workshops. The webinar will include a brief overview by Scientific Program Committee Chair, Amy Ising, and Pre-Conference Planning Chair, Bill Storm, and will be followed by an informal question and answer session.

Description

Since their introduction to the US market in 2007, electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have posed considerable challenges to both public health authorities and government regulators, especially given the debate – in both the scientific world and the community at large – regarding the potential advantages (e.g. helping individuals quit smoking) and disadvantages (e.g. renormalizing smoking) associated with the product1. Similarly, hookah – a kind of waterpipe used to smoke flavored tobacco – has increased in popularity in recent years, is known to be particularly popular among younger people, and has prompted a range of regulatory responses2. One important – and currently largely unexplored – area of research involves exploring consumer perceptions and experiences of these emerging tobacco products. In this work, we use online health discussion forums in conjunction with text mining and novel data visualization techniques to investigate consumer perceptions and experiences of e-cigarettes and hookah, focusing on the automatic identification of symptoms associated with each product, and consumer motivations for product use. Previous related research has focused on using text-mining to analyze e-cigarette or hookah related Twitter posts3,4 and on the qualitative identification of e-cigarette related symptoms from online discussion forums5. The research reported in this abstract is – to the best of our knowledge – the first time that text mining techniques have been used with online health forums to understand e-cigarette or hookah use.

Objective

Our aim in this work is to apply text mining and novel visualization techniques to textual data derived from online health discussion forums in order to better understand consumers’ experiences and perceptions of electronic cigarettes and hookah.

 

Submitted by Magou on