ISDS Conference

Preface

Effective public health surveillance is essential for detecting and responding to emerging public health threats, including terrorism and emerging infectious diseases. New surveillance methods are being developed and tested to improve the timeliness and completeness of detection of disease outbreaks. One promising set of approaches is syndromic surveillance, in which information about health events that precede a firm clinical diagnosis is captured early and rapidly from existing, usually electronic, data sources, and analyzed frequently to detect signals that might indicate an outbreak requiring investigation.

To provide a forum for scientists and practitioners to report on progress in developing and evaluating syndromic surveillance systems, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the New York Academy of Medicine, and CDC convened the second annual National Syndromic Surveillance Conference in New York City during October 23--24, 2003. The conference, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was attended by more than 460 public health practitioners and researchers, who had the opportunity to hear 41 oral presentations and view 50 poster presentations.

The original papers and posters for this conference were chosen by a scientific program committee after a review of submitted abstracts. Senior researchers in the field were also invited to address key concerns in surveillance for early detection of outbreaks. All participants who presented papers or posters at either the conference or at a preconference workshop were invited to submit manuscripts based on their presentations for publication in this Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Supplement. Each manuscript was then reviewed by at least two peer reviewers and final publication decisions were made by an editorial committee. Many of the articles are considerably different from the material originally presented at the conference. Certain authors updated their findings, and others were asked to revise their papers into descriptions of syndromic surveillance systems. Other presenters chose to submit only abstracts. Papers are presented here in the following order: system descriptions, research methods, evaluation, and public health practice.

In addition to these reports, other resources on syndromic surveillance are available. The proceedings of the 2002 National Syndromic Surveillance Conference were published in the Journal of Urban Health (accessible at http://jurban.oup journals.org/content/suppl_1/index.shtml). In May 2004, a revisedFramework for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems for Early Detection of Outbreaks was published (MMWR 2004;53[No. RR-5]). An annotated bibliography of published papers and other Internet-accessible materials has been developed and is maintained monthly on a CDC website (http://www.cdc.gov/epo/dphsi/syndromic/index.htm). An Internet-based forum (http://syndromic.forum.cdc.gov) was established for discussion of topics related to syndromic surveillance and was used to distribute answers to audience questions raised at the conference. A related forum (http://surveval.forum.cdc. gov) has been maintained for discussion of topics related to surveillance system evaluation. Finally, the website of the Annual Syndromic Surveillance Conferences (http://www. syndromic.org) includes links to recent news and scientific articles about syndromic surveillance, oral and poster presentations and workshop materials from past conferences, and notices of upcoming conferences. The third National Syndromic Surveillance Conference is planned for November 3--4, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The editorial committee acknowledges the work of the scientific planning committee: Dennis Cochrane, Christine Hahn, Patrick Kelley, Martin Kulldorff, John Loonsk, David Madigan, Richard Platt, and Don Weiss. The committee is also grateful for the support and efforts of the following staff members in conducting this conference and developing this Supplement: Alan Fleischman, Irv Gertner, and Jessica Hartman, New York Academy of Medicine; Rick Heffernan, New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; and Alan Davis, Division of Public Health Surveillance and Informatics, Epidemiology Program Office, CDC; Valerie Kokor, Division of International Health, Epidemiology Program Office; and Stephanie Malloy, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Malbea LaPete, MMWR, Epidemiology Program Office, CDC. Special thanks are given to JoEllen DeThomasis, Division of Applied Public Health Training and Division of Public Health Surveillance and Informatics, Epidemiology Program Office, CDC, who coordinated the preparation of these reports.

--- The Editorial Committee

The International Society for Disease Surveillance held its eleventh annual conference in San Diego on December 4th and 5th, 2012, under the theme Expanding Collaborations to Chart a New Course in Public Health Surveillance. During these two days, practitioners and researchers across many disciplines gathered to share best practices, lessons learned and cutting edge approaches to timely disease surveillance. A record number of abstracts were received, reviewed and presented – the schedule included 99 orals, 4 panels, 94 posters, 5 roundtables and 12 system demonstrations. Presenters represented 24 different countries from Africa, North and South America, Europe, and Asia . Topics covered included, but were not limited to, statistical methods for outbreak detection, border health, data quality, evaluation of novel data streams, influenza surveillance, best practices and policies for information sharing, social network analysis, data mining techniques, surveillance during weather events and mass gatherings, syndrome development, and novel uses of syndromic surveillance data. There were also discussions on the impact of regulations and standards development on disease surveillance, including Meaningful Use and the International Health Regulations.

The 2012 Conference was also host to several exciting keynote and plenary talks, including those given by James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and Bill Davenhall, Global manager of Esri's Health and Human Service Solutions Group. Plenary speakers Steve Waterman, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Simon Hay, University of Oxford; and Brian McCloskey, Health Protection Agency in London, reflected on the importance of effective collaborations in their respective topics of migrant and border health, malaria disease epidemiology and mass gathering health. National and international representatives from the CDC, the World Health Organization and the Department of Homeland Security also discussed their respective strategic plans for disease surveillance.

In addition, the 2012 Data Visualization Event enabled conference attendees to collaborate and gain knowledge of visualization tools and techniques applied to a rich, de-identified set of ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) data. Participants developed visualizations of chronic disease events using this common data set and presented their work during the evening poster session. The goals for this event were to demonstrate and share visualization tools and techniques that attendees could learn to apply to their own data and also to provide exposure to data elements available in ambulatory EHR systems and highlight their potential for surveillance and research.

My hope is that attendees of the 2012 ISDS Conference strengthened existing collaborations and fostered new ones, and returned to their places of work or study energized with new ideas and approaches to disease surveillance. The challenge for all of us is to sustain this new energy throughout the coming year and to leverage the tools available to us to share best practices and reach out for assistance when needed. We all want to improve the health of our populations, and collaborations will enable us to achieve that goal.

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) will hold its fourteenth annual conference in Denver, CO on December 10th and 11th, 2015. The society's mission is to improve population health by advancing the science and practice of disease surveillance, and the annual conference advances this mission by bringing together practitioners and researchers from multiple fields involved in disease surveillance, including public health, epidemiology, health policy, biostatistics and mathematical modeling, informatics and computer science. This year the conference received 224 abstract submissions, from 20 countries. We accepted 41 abstracts for oral presentations, along with 36 lightning talks and 98 posters.

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) held its fifteenth annual conference in Atlanta, GA, from December 6-8, 2016. Since 2001, individuals interested in sharing and learning emerging trends in surveillance research and practice have found the ISDS Annual Conference a unique forum to advance their knowledge in the discipline of disease surveillance. The 15th ISDS conference received a total of 233 abstracts from 23 countries. From the submissions, 189

(81%) were accepted for presentation at the conference as an oral presentation (N=96) or poster (N=93). The theme for the 15th annual conference was New Frontiers in Surveillance: Data Science and Health Security. The theme united two dominant trends in public health surveillance: 1) a growing desire to extract knowledge from increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data available from health information systems; and 2) increased pressure on nations to strengthen their capacity for disease surveillance and response to outbreaks when and where they occur across the globe. In addition to the major themes of the conference, abstracts were accepted in additional tracks that remain important to the practice of public health around the world: One Health uniting animal and human health; Methodological advances in applied epidemiology; Public health informatics; Public health policy; and Biosurveillance practice.

Washington State experienced a five-fold increase in deaths from unintentional drug overdoses between 1998 and 2014. The PMP collects data on controlled substances prescribed to patients and makes the data available to healthcare providers, giving providers another tool for patient care and safety. Optimal impact for the program depends on providers regularly accessing the information to review patients’ dispensing history. We have found through provider surveys and work with stakeholders that the best way to increase use is to make data seamlessly accessible through electronic health record systems (EHRs). This approach does not require a separate login to the PMP portal. This linkage works through the Health Information Exchange (HIE) to make PMP data available to providers via EHRs. The HIE facilitates electronic communication of patient information among organizations including hospitals and providers. In addition to the PMP, another resource to address the prescription drug abuse problem is the Emergency Department Information Exchange (EDIE), a web-based technology that specifically connects emergency departments statewide to track patients who visit multiple EDs. We also developed a connection between EDIE and PMP data through the HIE.

Objective

Demonstrate that use of the Washington State health information exchange (HIE) to facilitate access to prescription monitoring program (PMP) data enhances the effectiveness of a PMP. The increased accessibility will lead to improved patient care by giving providers more complete and recent data on patients’ controlled substance prescriptions.