On Wednesday, August 19, 2020, CSTE's Disaster Epidemiology Subcommittee hosted its monthly subcommittee call with a presentation on the use of earth observation data within syndromic surveillance systems. Call information and resources have been included below.
Emergency Data
The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) previously monitored Florida Poison Information Center (FPICN) data for timely detection of increases in carbon monoxide (CO) exposures before, during, and after hurricanes. Recent analyses have noted that CO poisonings have also increased with generator use and improper heating of homes during cold winter months in Florida. Similarly, increases in CO poisoning cases related to motor vehicles have been observed during summer months. CO is an odorless, colorless, poisonous gas causing sudden illness and death, if present in sufficient concentration in ambient air. The most common signs and symptoms include headache, nausea, lethargy/fatigue, weakness, abdominal discomfort/pain, confusion, and dizziness. This presentation summarizes Florida’s experience in identifying CO poisoning clusters using ESSENCE-based syndromic surveillance.
The primary goal of the Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS) is to monitor trends in non-specific symptoms of illness at the community level in real time. The ESSS includes emergency department chief complaint data that are categorized into eight syndromes: respiratory, gastrointestinal, fever, asthma, neurological, rash, carbon monoxide, and hypothermia. Since the onset of H1N1, fever syndrome has been used to monitor flu activity. As H1N1 spread nationwide, the need of visualizing flu activity geographically became clear, and urgent.
Objective
The objective of this paper is to describe a map application added to the New York state Electronic Syndromic Surveillance system (ESSS). The application allows system users to display the geographic distributions, and trends of fever syndrome that was used to monitor seasonal and H1N1 influenza activities.
Since October 2004, the Indiana State Health Department and the Marion County Health Department have been developing and using a syndromic surveillance system based on emergency department admission data. The system currently receives standards-based HL7 emergency department visit data, including free-text chief complaints from 72 hospitals throughout the state. Fourteen of these hospitals are in Marion County, which serves the Indianapolis metropolitan region (population 865,000).
Objective
This paper describes how a syndromic surveillance system based on emergency department data may be leveraged for other public health uses.
To compare locally-developed influenza-like syndrome definitions (derived from emergency department (ED) chief complaints) when applied to data from two ISDS DiSTRIBuTE Project participants: Boston and New York City (NYC) [1].
To compare the completeness of emergency department (ED) visit and hospital admissions data collected electronically for syndromic surveillance and data collected manually for a field surveillance exercise.
Automated syndromic surveillance systems often classify patients into syndromic categories based on free-text chief complaints. Chief complaints (CC) demonstrate low to moderate sensitivity in identifying syndromic cases. Emergency Department (ED) reports promise more detailed clinical information that may increase sensitivity of detection. Objective: Compare classification of patients based on chief complaints against classification from clinical data described in ED reports for identifying patients with an acute lower respiratory syndrome.
We sought to compare ambulatory care (AC) and emergency department (ED) data for the detection of clusters of lower gastrointestinal illness, using AC and ED data and AC+ED data combined, from two geographically separate health plans participating in the National Bioterrorism Syndromic Surveillance Demonstration Program [1].
Concern over oral health-related ED visits stems from the increasing number of unemployed and uninsured, the cost burden of these visits, and the unavailability of indicated dental care in EDs [1]. Of particular interest to NC state public health planners are Medicaid-covered visits. Syndromic data in biosurveillance systems offer a means to quantify these visits overall and by county and age group.
Objective
The objective was to use syndromic surveillance data from the North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool NCDETECT and from BioSense to quantify the burden on North Carolina (NC) emergency departments of oral health-related visits more appropriate for care in a dental office (ED). Calculations were sought in terms of the Medicaid-covered visit rate relative to the Medicaid-eligible population by age group and by county.
The massive flow of people to mass gathering events, such as festivals or sports events like EURO 2016, may increase public health risks. In the particular context of several terrorist attacks that took place in France in 2015, the French national Public Health agency has decided to strengthen the population health surveillance systems using the mandatory notification disease system and the French national syndromic surveillance SurSaUD®. The objectives in terms of health surveillance of mass gathering are: 1/ the timely detection of a health event (infectious cluster, environmental exposure, collective foodborne diseaseâ¦) 2/ the health impact assessment of an unexpected event such as a terrorist attack. In collaboration with the Regional Emergency Observatory (ORU), a procedure for the labeling of emergencies has been tested to identify the ED records that could be considered as linked to the event.
Objective:
To access the potential health impact on the population during mass gathering over time using labelling procedure in emergency department (ED).