Syndromic Surveillance

Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 public health reporting for Eligible Professionals (EPs) included a menu option for ambulatory syndromic surveillance. Review of currently existing models lead to a collaboration between the Illinois Health Information Exchange (ILHIE) and IDPH to build services that would support the use of the MPI, a database that can uniquely match records across systems. The MPI providers a mechanism for public health to manage multiple data streams, while maintaining confidentiality of health information and supporting the mission of public health to identify patterns of illness, apply effective interventions and conduct program evaluation. This initiative will allow IDPH to extend the use of the MPI to other surveillance domains, including hospital discharge, communicable disease, cancer and extensively drug resistance organism reporting.

Objective

This presentation will describe public health efforts to improve data collection by utilizing technology that supports record linkage through the implementation of the Master Patient Index (MPI). The initial use case will be applied to ambulatory syndromic surveillance at Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). It will include applications for incorporating the MPI into currently existing public health surveillance data and benefits to data integration and bidirectional information exchange.

Along with commensurate funding, an increased emphasis on syndromic surveillance systems occurred post September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. Since then, many syndromic surveillance systems have evolved and have ever-increasing functionality and visualization tools. As outbreak detection using these systems has demonstrated an equivocal track record, epidemiologists have sought out other interesting and unique uses for these systems. Over the numerous years of the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) conference, many of these studies have been presented, however, there has been a dearth of discussion related to how these systems should be used on a routine basis. As the initial goal of these systems was to provide a near real-time disease surveillance tool, the question of how to most effectively conduct this type of routine surveillance is paramount.

Objective

To discuss how various emergency department based syndromic surveillance systems from across the country and world are being used and to develop best practices for moving forward.

 

Syndromic surveillance system has been developed and implemented all over the world, and many studies showed that syndromic data sources had improved timeliness towards traditional surveillance method in the early warning of some infectious disease epidemics. However, owing to the uncertainties of disease epidemic features, clinical manifestations and population behaviors, the early warning timeliness of syndromic data sources might change across time and population, and few studies had explored their consistency in different epidemic periods of infectious diseases.

Objective

To study and compare the timeliness of syndromic surveillance system for the early warning of infectious diseases among different epidemic seasons.

The Florida Department of Health electronically receives hospital emergency department (ED) data from 180 EDs located in 54 of its 67 counties through its Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL). Florida EDs have begun to offer self-registration options to patients, which include ED self check-in kiosks, and pre-visit registration smartphone applications and websites. ESSENCE-FL receives ED data from multiple hospitals that use these patient self-registration methods. To date, limited investigation has been carried out to determine the impact of these self-registration methods on the data submitted to ESSENCE-FL. This project investigates and describes how SS data are affected by these options and provides possible best practices for identifying and analyzing these data.

Objective

To assess the effect of patient self-registration methods in hospital emergency departments on data in a syndromic surveillance (SS) system and provide suggestions for analysis of these data.