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Syndrome Validation

The Duval County Health Department (DCHD) serves a community of over one million people in Jacksonville, FL, USA. Each year, DCHD Epidemiology Program reports an average of 1133 (4-year average) notifiable diseases and conditions (NDC) with the exception of STD/HIV, TB, and viral hepatitis. Within Duval County, emergency medical care is provided by eight local hospitals, including one pediatric facility and a level-1 trauma center. These facilities contribute syndromic surveillance (SS) chief complaint (CC) data to the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics of Florida.

Historically, evaluations of SS systems have used ICD-9 diagnoses as the gold standard to determine predictive values. However, limited studies have surveyed reports of NDC to identify related emergency department (ED) visits and subsequent CC-based syndrome categorization. These data may provide public health investigators insight into health seeking behaviors, interpretation of SS signals, and prevalence of NDC within ED data.

 

Objective

This paper characterizes ED utilization among individuals diagnosed and reported with NDC. Furthermore, it evaluates the subsequent assignment of SS syndromes based on the patient’s CC during their ED visit.

Referenced File
Submitted by hparton on

Effective and valid surveillance of syndromes can be extremely useful in the early detection of outbreaks and disease trends. However, medical chart checks without patient identifiers and lack of diagnoses in A08 data has made validation difficult. With the rising availability of electronic health records (EHRs) to local health departments, the ability to evaluate syndromic surveillance systems (SSS) has improved. In LAC, ED data are collected from hospitals and classified into categories based on chief complaints. The most reported syndrome in LAC is the respiratory classification, which is intended to broadly capture respiratory pathogen activity trends. To test the validity of the LAC Department of Public Health (DPH) respiratory syndrome classification, ED syndromic surveillance data were analyzed using corresponding EHRs from one hospital in LAC.

Objective

To compare and validate syndromic surveillance categorization against electronic health records at one hospital emergency department (ED) in Los Angeles County (LAC).

Submitted by elamb on
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