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Disease Surveillance

Description

Previous studies in developed countries showed school absenteeism data can serve as a proxy for monitoring infectious disease activities and facilitates early community outbreak detection. However, absenteeism patterns may differ in developing settings and affect the utility of the surveillance system. Despite the non-specific nature of absenteeism data, other practical challenges will need to overcome for system set up and maintenance in remote area.

 

Objective

We explored the feasibility and practicability of setting up an electronic school absenteeism reporting system for disease surveillance in rural area of Kampot province, Cambodia.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Under the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program Rule, hospitals are eligible to receive incentive payments from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services provided they meet certain requirements including Meaningful Use (MU). Demonstrating MU requires meeting a core and menu set of objectives including the capability to submit electronic syndromic surveillance, Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR), and immunization data in accordance with state law and practice. NH is building a NH Heath Information Exchange to serve all NH's MU needs including those of public health. This represents a huge opportunity for public health to collect more data to enhance disease detection and control, improve safety, and reduce health disparities, but also presents an integration challenge.

 

Objective

To describe steps used to build the required infrastructure to meet Public Health MU reporting requirements for electronic syndromic surveillance, ELR, and immunization data in NH Division of Public Health Services.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

In response to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the NH Department of Health and Human Services (NH DHHS) engaged state and external partners in the design of an early warning surveillance system to support bioterrorism and emergency preparedness. Initially, NH DHHS began collecting four syndrome counts from thirteen hospital Emergency Departments (ED) by fax. Automation began in 2002, when an over the counter (OTC) syndromic surveillance pilot system was implemented by Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC). In 2003-2004 this system, the Syndromic Tracking and Encounter Management System (STEMS), was expanded to include school absentee and occupational health reports. Over time, an internal Death Data application was automated to query vital record deaths, and in 2005 a real-time ED surveillance pilot, the Automated Hospital ED Data System (AHEDD), was developed by STC to replace manual ED surveillance. Over the past decade NH continued to expand the original concept with innovative approaches to identify undetected or under reported disease outbreaks.

Objective

To illustrate development of syndromic surveillance in NH, share innovation experience with the public health community, and contribute to the syndromic surveillance body of knowledge in the new public health Information Technology landscape.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

In development for over fourteen years, ESSENCE is a disease surveillance system utilized by public health stakeholders at city, county, state, regional, national, and global levels. The system was developed by a team from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) with substantial collaborations with the US Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (DoD GEIS), US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and numerous public health departments. This team encompassed a broad range of individuals with backgrounds in epidemiology, mathematics, computer science, statistics, engineering and medicine with significant and constant influence from many public health collaborators.

Objective

This talk will describe the history and events that influenced the design and architecture decisions of the Electronic Surveillance System for Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE)(1). Additionally, it will discuss the current functionality and capabilities of ESSENCE and the future goals and planned enhancements of the system.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on
Description

Effective communicable disease control through rapid detection and prompt response to outbreaks is one of the priorities during a humanitarian crisis, as communicable diseases can be a major cause of morbidity and mortality in emergencies, particularly in countries with poor disease surveillance mechanisms. Yemen is among many developing countries being hit by conflicts, displacement of population and disruption of basic services, where among other public health risks and threats the population is exposed to risks of several communicable diseases. Thus, effective preventive and control measures through early detection and rapid identification of infectious diseases and provision of a public health response to communicable disease outbreaks, a crucial priority health intervention, need to be directed towards diseases that are endemic and particularly those which can potentially cause excess numbers of mortality and morbidity within a short span of time.

Objective

The intended objective of the Electronic Disease Early Warning System (eDEWS) is to minimize morbidity and mortality due to communicable diseases through detection of potential outbreaks at their earliest possible stage using a novel modeling approach that mainly facilitates the transformation of data into actionable information.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

The goal of adequate biosurveillance is to signal that an outbreak may be occurring and through subsequent work is confirmed or refuted. Such a system should be equally able to detect outbreaks of diseases of extremely low reporting frequency, or those with high seasonality. Methods of detecting increases in notifiable communicable diseases reported to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (MDHSS) were based on quartile comparisons to 5-year historical disease reports for the report week and resulted in frequent detection of statistically significant increases that were, in fact, not indicative of disease outbreaks. Frequently generated alerts led to 'alarm fatigue' in epidemiologists.

Objective

Develop a statistically rigorous automated process for weekly communicable disease report analysis to improve the speed and accuracy of outbreak detection in Missouri.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

Tanzania has a disease surveillance infrastructure with national, regional and district offices for human and animal disease surveillance. Electricity shortages and limited communications infrastructure create a challenge for a rapid information exchange of the disease surveillance information. Cell phones revolution provided 75.8% mobile network coverage of the population and 45% of land area in 2005-2013. At the moment 98% of the district centers are covered with the network. The network growth is expected at a pace of 17-25% annually throughout 2015. The following technologies become available for nation-wide use in surveillance: 1) online voice, 2) SMS, 3) mobile web, and 4) Android applications on cell phones. These technologies have different advantages for disease surveillance that are evaluated for proper application.

Objective

In the past few years Tanzania has experienced a cell phone technology revolution presenting new opportunities for disease surveillance improvements. This dynamic environment, challenged with resource constraints and the need for a one-health joint effort for disease surveillance and control, calls for evaluation of technologies for better planning and implementation of future information technology projects in disease surveillance.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

In Rwanda, communicable diseases represent about 90% of all reported medical consultations in health centers. The country has often faced epidemics including emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. To enhance its preparedness to identify and respond to outbreaks and prevent epidemics, the Government of Rwanda has developed and deployed a nationwide electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system (eIDSR) using mobile technology. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has funded Voxiva to build, operate and support this program. The design of eIDSR system was completed in November 2011, and then 1524 end-users were progressively trained for the national roll out of the system until April 2013. All 521 health facilities in Rwanda have been trained and are currently using the electronic system (100 % of national coverage since April 2013).

Objective

There are important lessons learned from the successful implementation of this national electronic system and this abstract outlines those lessons.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

In this study, we compare two methods of generating grid points to enable efficient geographic cluster detection when the original geographical data are prohibitively numerous. One method generates uniform grid points, and the other employs quad trees to generate non-uniform grid points. We observe differences in the results of the spatial scan approach to cluster detection for both of these grid generation schemes. In both our simulated experiment, and our analysis of real data, the grid generation schemes produce different results. Generally speaking, the quad tree scheme is more sensitive to detecting high resolution spatial clusters than the uniform scheme. The quad tree grid point scheme may be a useful alternative to the uniform (and other) grid point generation schemes when it is important to set up a surveillance system sensitive to clusters at unspecified spatial resolutions. The quad tree grid scheme may also be useful in a number of other geographic surveillance applications.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Major challenges in syndromic surveillance today include lack of standardization in syndrome definitions and limited ability to detect outbreaks of specific and rare diseases. To generate situational awareness surveillance results across various regions must be comparable and epidemiologically well defined. In addition, the high cost of obtaining and maintaining powerful computing resources (e.g., parallel computers) needed for data processing and analysis, and absence of a protocol for data sharing, highlight some of the obstacles to achieving situational awareness.

Cloud computing is an enabling technology that can overcome these challenges and facilitate new and novel approaches to surveillance.

 

Objective

We present a Cloud Computing based approach to disease surveillance that facilitates efficient data collection, processing and storage, as well as new concepts for data sharing and data fusion, disease search and situational awareness.

Submitted by elamb on