In November of 2011, the local Public Health unit responsible for the Edmonton area (population 1.2mil) was alerted to an individual meeting the case definition for measles in the ED. A key part of the management strategy was to identify contacts to the index case, perform a risk assessment and, if applicable, inform them of the risk. Given the transmission characteristics, the risk for this group was defined as those present within the geographic area/environment of the index case within a specified time period. Public Health utilized the established manual lookup of hospital records and piloted an automated data query through the syndromic surveillance system, ARTSSN. This served as opportunity to validate the ability to generate a contact list, based on risk geography and time, of the ARTSSN system, and to compare the timeliness of each result.
Objective
Following a clinical case of measles presenting to an urban emergency department (ED), the local health authority sought to identify all patients that might be at risk for disease. This list of contacts was generated through a manual search of hospital records and through a piloted automated data query of the health authority's syndromic surveillance system, Alberta Real Time Syndromic Surveillance Net (ARTSSN). The purpose of this pilot study was to: 1) compare the completeness of the two lookup methods and, 2) describe the time requirements needed for each method.