Patients’ chief complaints (CCs) as a common data source, has been widely used in syndromic surveillance due to its timeliness, accuracy and availability. For automated syndromic surveillance, CCs always classified into predefined syndromic categories to facilitate subsequent data aggregation and analysis. However, in rural China, most outpatient doctors recorded the information of patients (e.g. CCs) into clinic logs manually rather than computers. Thus, more convenient surveillance method is needed in the syndromic surveillance project (ISSC). And the first and important thing is to select the targeted symptoms/syndromes.
Objective
To select the potential targeted symptoms/syndromes as early warning indicators for epidemics or outbreaks detection in rural China