Public Health Surveillance Data in North Carolina

Defining Emergency Department Asthma Visits for Public Health Surveillance, North Carolina, 2008–2009

INTRODUCTION When using emergency department (ED) data sets for public health surveillance, a standard approach is needed to define visits attributable to asthma. Asthma can be the first (primary) or a subsequent (2nd through 11th) diagnosis. Our study objective was to develop a definition of ED visits attributable to asthma for public health surveillance. We evaluated the effect of including v...

Prostate cancer as a public health issue in North Carolina.

The public health challenge of obesity in North Carolina.

besity is one of the most important public health issues of our time. Just as infectious diseases threatened the health and well being of communities in the early 20th century, chronic diseases are now the greatest threat of the 21st. The risk factors for obesity, physical inactivity and poor nutrition have begun to approach the public health impact of tobacco use. The resulting rise in chronic...

Defining the need for dental care in North Carolina: contributions of public health surveillance of dental diseases and conditions.

long-standing principle held by epidemiologists who study the health status of human populations is that any disease can demonstrate important variation among people with different characteristics, across different geographic locations, and over time. Substantial fluctuations in the amount of disease can occur as the relative importance of diseases rises and falls, usually in response to scient...

Distributed data processing for public health surveillance

BACKGROUND Many systems for routine public health surveillance rely on centralized collection of potentially identifiable, individual, identifiable personal health information (PHI) records. Although individual, identifiable patient records are essential for conditions for which there is mandated reporting, such as tuberculosis or sexually transmitted diseases, they are not routinely required f...