Skip to main content

Displaying results 9 - 16 of 16
  • A Novel Method for Defining Health Facility Catchment Areas in a Low Income Country

    Content Type: Abstract

    The catchment area of a health-care facility is used to assess health service utilization and calculate population-based rates of disease. Current approaches for catchment definition have significant limitations such as being based solely on… read more
    … The catchment area of a health-care facility is used to assess health service utilization … The catchment area of a health-care facility is used to assess health service utilization …
  • Can all-cause school absenteeism be used to optimize the timing of school closure in response to pandemic influenza?

    Content Type: Abstract

    School closure has long been proposed as a non-pharmaceutical intervention in reducing the transmission of pandemic influenza. Children are thought to have high transmission potential because of their low immunity to circulating… read more
    … data on the rate of influenza-related nurse visits in corresponding schools to validate our findings.   … using data on the rate of influenza-related nurse visits in corresponding schools to validate our findings. … the daily count of all-cause absenteeism and school nurse visits for fever/flu syndrome in 1206 public schools in New …
  • Assessing and Optimizing the Accuracy of Physician Billing Claims for Use in Automated Syndromic Surveillance

    Content Type: Abstract

    To assess the accuracy of community-based physician claims for identifying 5 syndromes: fever, gastrointestinal, neurological, rash, and respiratory.
    … listed has yet to be assessed in community- based primary care, where a majority of patients with these syndromes … status (+/-), syn- drome type, syndrome ICD-9 code, and visit month (to avoid seasonal bias). The RAMQ then sent the … patient complaints, symptoms, and signs for each sampled visit. The sensitivity, specific- ity, and positive …
  • A Probabilistic Case-finding Algorithm for Chronic Disease Surveillance

    Content Type: Abstract

    There is a clear need for improved surveillance of chronic diseases to guide public health practice and policy. Chronic disease surveillance has tended to use administrative data, due to the need to link encounters for an individual over time and to… read more
    … a patient to have one hospitalization or two physician visits within two years with a diagnostic code for DM. While … a patient to have one hospitalization or two physician visits within two years with a diagnostic code for DM. While …
  • Beyond Detection: Attack Characterization with Syndromic and Clinical Data

    Content Type: Abstract

    Most research in syndromic surveillance has emphasized early detection, but clinical diagnosis of the index case will tend to occur before detection by syndromic surveillance for certain types of outbreaks [1]. Syndromic surveillance may, however,… read more
    … we conducted a simulation study using ambulatory visit records for respiratory conditions. We used a model … [1] to simulate the daily increase in syndromic clinic visits and the time to first diagnosis through blood culture … each outbreak, we injected the simulated syndromic clinic visits into baseline data and estimated the dis- ease burden …
  • Effect of expanded recommendations for pediatric seasonal influenza vaccination: an international comparison

    Content Type: Abstract

    Seasonal influenza epidemics are responsible for over 200,000 hospitalizations in the United States per year, and 39,000 of them are in children. In the United States, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices guides… read more
    … to make an international comparison of rates of ED visits for influenza-like illness (ILI) following the United … the post-policy change response of ILI-related ED visits to Children’s Hospital Boston, using Montreal … We observed a 34% decline in the rate of ILI-related ED visits among two- to four-year-olds for Children’s Hospital …
  • Does Climate Predict the Timing of Peak Influenza Activity in the United States?

    Content Type: Abstract

    Though spatio-temporal patterns of influenza spread have often suggested that environmental factors, such as temperature, solar radiation and humidity play a key role, few studies have directly assessed their effect on the timing… read more
    … in the United States using pediatric hospitalization visits with ICD-9 codes equal to 486.00, 487.00, 487.10 or …
  • Quantifying the potential benefit of early detection for preventing morbidity and mortality: a simulation study of cryptosporidium outbreak

    Content Type: Abstract

    Many studies evaluate the timeliness and accuracy of outbreak detection algorithms used in syndromic surveillance. Of greater interest, however, is defining the outcome associated with improved detection. In case of a waterborne cryptosporidiosis… read more
    … distribution system, and thus should be generalized with care. Our results also suggest that timeliness of BWA is …