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Use of Severity Indicators in a Public Health Surveillance System

Description

Data streams related to case severity have been added to the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), a disease-monitoring application used by the Department of Defense (DoD), as an additional analytic capability to alert the user when indications for events requiring expanded medical resources exist in clinical data streams. Commonly used indicators are admission and death, but fatalities are rare and many DoD clinics lack admitting capability, so we sought to derive additional severity indicators from outpatient records. This abstract describes the technical details and the thought process behind two novel derived indicators: Sick-in-Quarters (SIQ) and Escalating Care.

Objective

To evaluate new severity indicators that mimic a public health professional or clinician's judgment in determining the severity of a public health event when detected by a surveillance system.

Submitted by elamb on