Attached is a word document with multiple syndromes that we have found useful during the coagulopathy cluster situation. Most used queries are highlighted in yellow.
These queries were created in response to marijuana, particularly synthetic marijuana, tainted with anticoagulants often found in rodent poisons.
Query purpose:
To assist state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal public health practitioners in trend monitoring for long COVID (also commonly described as Post-COVID Complications (PCC) or long-haul COVID) related visits in the emergency department (ED) setting using syndromic surveillance data.
How it was developed:
Subject matter experts from seven jurisdictions (WA; VA; Harris County, TX; Pierce-Tacoma County, WA; NE; KS; KY) created and validated the definition using ED visit data from January – December 2023.
Query purpose:
To assist state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal public health practitioners in identifying patients likely to have long COVID (also commonly described as Post-COVID Complications (PCC) or long-haul COVID) by reviewing visits in the emergency department (ED) setting and to help with trend monitoring for long COVID related visits using syndromic surveillance data.
How it was developed:
Query purpose:
The aim of this syndrome definition is to assist with rapid detection of potential initial visits for a firearm injury. The following injury intents due to firearms are included in this definition: unintentional, intentional self-directed, assault, undetermined intent, legal intervention, and terrorism. The definition aims to capture only initial encounters for a firearm injury and negate subsequent encounters or sequelae.
How it was developed:
Ontologies representing knowledge from the public health and surveillance domains currently exist. However, they focus on infectious diseases (infectious disease ontology), reportable diseases (PHSkbFretired) and internet surveillance from news text (BioCaster ontology), or are commercial products (OntoReason public health ontology). From the perspective of biosurveillance text mining, these ontologies do not adequately represent the kind of knowledge found in clinical reports. Our project aims to fill this gap by developing a stand-alone ontology for the public health/biosurveillance domain, which (1) provides a starting point for standard development, (2) is straightforward for public health professionals to use for text analysis, and (3) can be easily plugged into existing syndromic surveillance systems.
Objective
To develop an application ontology - the extended syndromic surveillance ontology - to support text mining of ER and radiology reports for public health surveillance. The ontology encodes syndromes, diagnoses, symptoms, signs and radiology results relevant to syndromic surveillance (with a special focus on bioterrorism).
Air pollution is well documented to cause adverse health effects in the population. Epidemiological/toxicological studies have demonstrated that air pollution is associated with various adverse health outcomes, ranging from mortality to subclinical respiratory symptoms. Classical epidemiological studies of the health effects of air pollution are typically retrospective. In order to assess the effectiveness of any public health messages or interventions in a timely manner there is a need to be able to systematically detect any health effects occurring in real-time. The UK syndromic surveillance systems are coordinated by Public Health England (PHE) and are used to monitor infectious diseases in real-time. This study is the first in the UK to explore whether syndromic surveillance systems can detect public health impacts associated with air pollution events.
Objective: This study examined whether the current UK real-time syndromic surveillance systems can detect public health impacts associated with air pollution events such as fires and ambient air pollution episodes.
This paper describes three years of electronic health record (EHR) data from a network of urban ambulatory care clinics in New York City.
Health care processes consume increasing volumes of digital data. However, creating and leveraging high quality integrated health data is challenging because large-scale health data derives from systems where data is captured from varying workflows, yielding varying data quality, potentially limiting its utility for various uses, including population health. To ensure accurate results, it’s important to assess the data quality for the particular use. Examples of sub-optimal health data quality abound: accuracy varies for medication and diagnostic data in hospital discharge and claims data; electronic laboratory data used to identify notifiable public-health cases shows varying levels of completeness across data sources; data timeliness has been found to vary across different data sources. Given that there is clear increasing focus on large health data sources; there are known data quality issues that hinder the utility of such data; and there is a paucity of medical literature describing approaches for evaluating these issues across integrated health data sources, we hypothesize that novel methods for ongoing monitoring of data quality in rapidly growing large health data sets, including surveillance data, will improve the accuracy and overall utility of these data.
Objective
We describe how entropy, a key information measure, can be used to monitor the characteristics of chief complaints in an operational surveillance system.
Norovirus infection results in considerable morbidity in the United States where an estimated 21 million illnesses, 70,000 hospitalizations, and 800 deaths are caused by NV annually. Additionally, NV is responsible for approximately 50% of foodborne outbreaks. Between January 2008 and June 2012, 875 NV outbreaks were reported to the Virginia Department of Health (VDH). To assist in detecting possible disease outbreaks such as NV, VDH utilizes the web-based Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE) to monitor and detect public health events across Virginia. ESSENCE performs automated parsing of chief complaint text into 10 syndrome categories, including a non-specific GI syndrome that serves as a proxy for GI illnesses like NV.
Objective
To assess the relationship between emergency department and urgent care center chief complaint data for gastrointestinal illness and reported norovirus (NV) outbreaks to develop an early warning tool for NV outbreak activity. The tool will provide an indicator of increasing NV outbreak activity in the community allowing for earlier public health action to mitigate NV outbreaks.
Syndromic surveillance information can be a useful for the early recognition of outbreaks, acute public health events and in response to natural disasters. Inhalation of particulate matter from wildland fire smoke has been linked to various acute respiratory and cardiovascular health effects. Historically, wildfire disasters occur across Southern California on a recurring basis. During 2003 and 2007, wildfires ravaged San Diego County and resulted in historic levels of population evacuation, significant impact on air quality and loss of lives and infrastructure. In 2011, the National Institutes of HealthNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded Michigan Tech Research Institute a grant to address the impact of fire emissions on human health, within the context of a changing climate. San Diego County Public Health Services assisted on this project through assessment of population health impacts and provisioning of syndromic surveillance data for advanced modeling.
Objective
This presentation describes how syndromic surveillance information was combined with fire emission information and spatio-temporal fire occurrence data to evaluate, model and forecast climate change impacts on future fire scenarios.