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Syndromes

In June 2009, the CDC defined a confirmed case of H1N1 as a person with an ILI and laboratory confirmed novel influenza A H1N1 virus infection. ILI is defined by the CDC as fever and cough and/or sore throat, in the absence of a known cause other than influenza. ILI cases are usually reported without accounting for alternate diagnoses (that is, pneumonia). Therefore, evaluation is needed to determine the impact of alternate diagnoses on the accuracy of the ILI case definition.

Objective

This study investigates the impact of alternate diagnoses on the accuracy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) case definition for influenza-like illness (ILI) when used as a screening tool for influenza A (H1N1) virus during the 2009 pandemic, and the implications for public health surveillance.

Referenced File
Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Emerging event detection is the process of automatically identifying novel and emerging ideas from text with minimal human intervention. With the rise of social networks like Twitter, topic detection has begun leveraging measures of user influence to identify emerging events. Twitter's highly skewed follower/followee structure lends itself to an intuitive model of influence, yet in a context like the Emerging Infections Network (EIN), a sentinel surveillance listserv of over 1400 infectious disease experts, developing a useful model of authority becomes less clear. Who should we listen to on the EIN? To explore this, we annotated a body of important EIN discussions and tested how well 3 models of user authority performed in identifying those discussions. In previous work we proposed a process by which only posts that are based on specific "important" topics are read, thus drastically reducing the amount of posts that need to be read. The process works by finding a set of "bellwether" users that act as indicators for "important" topics and only posts relating to these topics are then read. This approach does not consider the text of messages, only the patterns of user participation. Our text analysis approach follows that of Cataldi et al.[1], using the idea of semantic "energy" to identify emerging topics within Twitter posts. Authority is calculated via PageRank and used to weight each author's contribution to the semantic energy of all terms occurring in within some interval ti. A decay parameter d defines the impact of prior time steps on the current interval.

Objective

To explore how different models of user influence or authority perform when detecting emerging events within a small-scale community of infectious disease experts.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention case definition of influenza-like illness (ILI) as fever with cough and/or sore throat casts a wide net resulting in lower sensitivity which can have major implications on public health surveillance and response.

 

Objective

This study investigates additional signs and symptoms to further enhance the ILI case definition for real-time surveillance of influenza.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Tracking emergency department (ED) asthma visits is an important part of asthma surveillance, as ED visits can be preventable and may represent a failure of asthma control efforts. When using limited clinical ED datasets for secondary purposes such as public health surveillance, it is important to employ a standard approach to operationally defining ED visits attributable to asthma. The prevailing approach uses only the primary ICD-9-CM diagnosis assigned to the ED visit; however, doing so may underestimate the public health impact of asthma. We conducted this pilot study to determine the value of including ED visits with asthma-related diagnoses in secondary or tertiary positions. For example, for an ED visit with a primary diagnosis of upper respiratory infection and secondary diagnosis of asthma, it is possible that the infection triggered the asthma exacerbation and the visit could be attributed to both infection and asthma.

 

Objective

Determine operational definition of ED visits attributable to asthma for public health surveillance purposes.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on
  • Why the syndrome was created? This syndrome was created to monitor Lyme disease related emergency room visits using regular expressions in R. 
  • Syndromic surveillance system (e.g., ESSENCE, R STUDIO, RODS, etc.) Data collected from Epicenter, but parsed and analysed in R/Rstudio
  • Data sources the syndrome was used on (e.g., Emergency room, EMS, Air Quality, etc.) Emergency room and Urgent Care
Submitted by Anonymous on
  • Why the syndrome was created? This syndrome was created to monitor tick related emergency room visits using regular expressions in R. 
  • Syndromic surveillance system (e.g., ESSENCE, R STUDIO, RODS, etc.) Data collected from Epicenter, but parsed and analysed in R/Rstudio
  • Data sources the syndrome was used on (e.g., Emergency room, EMS, Air Quality, etc.) Emergency room and Urgent Care
Submitted by Anonymous on

A step-wise article on developing this syndrome definition can be found in the April 2019 NSSP Update https://www.cdc.gov/nssp/news.html

This syndrome is an initial attempt at an improved Drowning and Submersion query in NSSP ESSENCE. It was developed starting with the existing ESSENCE SubSyndrome for DrowningOrSubmersion.

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

The following syndrome was developed to explore emergency department visit records involving people experiencing homelessness. Trends over time, patient demographics, geographic distribution, and primary reasons for seeking care were explored. Additionally, we have been using this definition, in combination with other illness/injury specific definitions to assess the trends in among people experiencing homelessness (e.g., cold-related illness among people experiencing homelessness during record low temperatures).

Submitted by Anonymous on

This syndrome is a work-in-progress and was created to experiment with Chief Complaint text indicating a language barrier between medical professionals and patient and/or an interpreter is needed to provide medical care.

This was developed on the NSSP ESSENCE CCQV data in the Processed Chief Complaint field. I suspect Triage Notes would also contain this type of information if you receive that field.

Submitted by ZSteinKS on
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