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).