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Data Integration

Since its inception in 2008, PHO has grown through new funding to establish the agency, as well as a series of program transfers from the Government of Ontario, including ID surveillance. PHO’s current role in ID surveillance in Ontario is to support the public health and health care systems with surveillance information, tools, and resources for the prevention and control of IDs. PHO also provides scientific and technical expertise for IDs, including different aspects of surveillance (e.g., data entry requirements, statistical algorithms, provincial surveillance reports).

The overarching aim of the framework is to establish PHO’s key priorities, strategies, and actions to guide ID surveillance over the next five years and will help advance ID surveillance across Ontario. This is PHO’s first step towards a strategic and coordinated approach to ID surveillance.

Objective

This presentation will outline the development process for Public Health Ontario’s (PHO’s) first Infectious Disease Surveillance Framework (the framework), highlight key elements of the framework, and identify examples of infectious disease (ID) surveillance activities and projects that align with the framework.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Cyanobacteria and marine algae are ubiquitous in the earth's freshwaters and oceans. Under the right circumstances, these organisms can proliferate, causing harmful algal blooms (HABs) which may produce toxins that threaten human and animal health as well as local and regional ecology. Animals may play in, swim in, or drink from ponds and lakes that have extensive blooms, even if the water bodies smell or look unpleasant to people; the first warning that a toxin-producing HAB exists may come from the death of a pet dog or livestock.

Submitted by uysz on

The multiple forms of Human African Trypanosomiasis (human T.b. gambiense and zoonotic T.b. rhodesiense, as well as the several strains which cause disease in animals) that occur in Uganda make coordinating the scientific and developmental, human and animal, social and economic systems influencing their control particularly complex. Uganda is one of the only countries in Africa that has experienced largescale, debilitating outbreaks of HAT, and co-ordinated major control programmes.

Submitted by uysz on

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. with radon exposure as the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and the number one cause of lung cancer among nonsmokers. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that one in fifteen homes nationwide has elevated radon levels. Although public outreach efforts promote radon testing and subsequent mitigation when unsafe levels are found, data are non-standardized largely because of varying regulations among states, making targeted public health actions challenging. In accordance with the Federal Radon Action Plan to demonstrate results of radon risk reduction, EPA is collaborating with CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program. The Tracking Program has existing relationships with state and local partners to provide various environmental and health data, an established process for managing the data, and robust tools to analyze and visualize the data that are made publicly accessible via a web-based system (Tracking Network).

Objective

Test the feasibility of a publicly accessible national radon database by conducting a pilot project to standardize previously nonsystemized, uncoordinated state and local health department radon data sources into a nationally consistent radon information resource.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Electronic disease surveillance canonically represents analysis performed on health records with respect to their syndromes, complaints, lab data, etc. This data can tell the story of a patient’s current status but does not provide a holistic look at the where the patient is from. By incorporating census data, a deeper examination of the patient’s area can be performed which may result in discovery of risk factors associated with race, economic status, and culture.

Objective

The objective of this project is to enable a deeper analysis of patient health by correlating patient health records with the census demographic data. Based upon these correlations, the ESSENCE system will be enhanced with new query filtering capabilities.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Vector borne diseases like Japanese Encephalitis (JE) result from the convergence of multiple factors, including, but not limited to, human, animal, environmental, and economic and social determinants. Thus, to combat these problems, it is essential to have a systematic understanding of drivers and determinants based on a surveillance system that systematically gathers and analyzes data emanating from across multiple disciplines.

Submitted by uysz on

Pakistan being a subtropical region is highly susceptible to water-borne, air-borne and vector-borne infectious diseases (IDs). Each year, millions of its people are exposed to, and infected with, deadly pathogens including hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria, and now-a-days dengue fever (DF). Monitoring and response management to natural or man-made IDs is non-existent in the country due to lack of robust infrastructure for health surveillance. DF outbreaks in 2005-2011 alone resulted in more than 50,000 infections and about 1500 people lost their lives.

Submitted by uysz on

The Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH), in collaboration with Yale Emerging Infections Program (EIP), receives funding to particpate in the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) and Foodborne Disease Centers for Outbreak Response Enhancement (FoodCORE). FoodNet is an active population-based surveillance network that monitors trends for ten enteric diseases and conducts special studies to better understand the causes of foodborne illness. FoodCORE develops best practices related to the detection, investigation, and control or disease outbreaks, particularly those due to to Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and Listeria (SSL). Foodborne disease surveillance and response is a collaborative effort requiring real-time data sharing between key stakeholders including: DPH Epidemiology, DPH Laboratory, DPH Food Protection Program, Yale EIP, and local health department (LHD) staff.

Objective

To develop an integrated system for routine enteric disease surveillance, cluster detection and monitioring, information sharing among key stakeholders, and documentation.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The advent of Meaningful Use (MU) has allowed for the expansion of data collected at the hospital level and received by public health for syndromic surveillance. The triage note, a free text expansion on the chief complaint, is one of the many variables that are becoming commonplace in syndromic surveillance data feeds. Triage notes are readily available in many ED information systems, including, but not limited to, Allscripts, Cerner, EPIC, HMS, MedHost, Meditech, and T-System. North Carolina’s syndromic surveillance system, NC DETECT, currently collects triage notes from 33 out of 122 hospitals in the State (27%), and this number is likely to increase.

Objective

This roundtable will provide a forum for the ISDS community to discuss the use of emergency department (ED) triage notes in syndromic surveillance. It will be an opportunity to discuss both the benefits of having this variable included in syndromic surveillance data feeds, as well as the drawbacks and challenges associated with working with such a detailed data field.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Population health relies on tracking patients through a continuum of care with data from disparate sources. An assumption is made that all records of a patient from all the sources are connected. As was realized during the process of operationalizing algorithms for population health, not all patient records are connected. Disconnected records negatively impact results: from individual patient care management through population health’s predictive analytics. An enterprise master patient index (EMPI) system can be employed to connect a patient’s records across disparate systems, but it requires comprehensive tuning to maximize the number of connected records. This presentation describes how one large healthcare integrated delivery network tuned their EMPI system to maximize the number of connected patient records across all sources.

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