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Visualizing Data Quality: Tools and Views

Description

Distribute is a national emergency department syndromic surveillance project developed by the International Society for Disease Surveillance for influenza-like-illness (ILI) that integrates data from existing state and local public health department surveillance systems. The Distribute project provides graphic comparisons of both ILI-related clinical visits across jurisdictions and a national picture of ILI. Unlike other surveillance systems, Distribute is designed to work solely with summarized (aggregated) data which cannot be traced back to the un-aggregated 'raw' data. This and the distributed, voluntary nature of the project creates some unique data quality issues, with considerable site to site variability. Together with the ISDS, the University of Washington has developed processes and tools to address these challenges, mirroring work done by others in the Distribute community.

Objective

To present exploratory tools and methods developed as part of the data quality monitoring of Distribute data, and discuss these tools and their applications with other participants.

Submitted by elamb on