Complex, highly parameterized data models are often used to detect syndromic outbreaks. Unfortunately, such models can pose greater maintenance challenges as parameter variations increase. As such, our work focuses on whether day-of-the-week (DoW) effects may (or may not) show little variation across hospitals.
Objective
This paper investigates the existence of the DoW effect across twenty-six hospitals within the Indiana Public Health Emergency Surveillance System. We will consider both the impact of each DoW and the impact of individual hospitals.
With increasing awareness of SyS systems, there has been a concurrent increase in demand for data from these systems â both from researchers and from the media. The opioid epidemic occurring in the United States has forced the SyS community to determine the best way to present these data in a way that makes sense while acknowledging the incompleteness and variability in how the data are collected at the hospital level and queried at the user level. While significant time and effort are spent discussing optimal queries, responsible presentation of the data - including data disclaimers - is rarely discussed within the SyS community.
Objective:
To discuss data disclaimers and caveats that are fundamental to sharing syndromic surveillance (SyS) data