An Overview of the Medical Data Surveillance System

In theater, it is essential that the services have a common medical system; therefore, a program was initiated to design, develop, and implement an automated system to process medical data on deployed personnel. Once it was demonstrated that medical information could be efficiently processed in theater, a research effort was undertaken to automatically analyze the data in order to detect deviations from historic illness patterns. Consequently, a system called the Medical Data Surveillance System (MDSS) was designed and developed as a Web enabled system for data analysis and reporting. The analysis capability of MDSS allows the user to compare the relative number of cases in one set of categories to those in another set across two different time intervals for a selected military unit. Or, the relative number of cases for two different military units can be compared during the same time interval. A unique set of signal detection algorithms called Dynamic ChangePoint Detection (DCD) allows the user to select and analyze the entire population or those cases associated with a particular medical treatment facility (MTF), those cases associated with a particular Military Unit, or those cases associated with a group of Military Units that used a specified set of MTFs. Results are returned in a tabular format and as colored bar graphs. The analyses are conducted on the cases that have been reported, and on illness rates per thousand per day. Increasing and decreasing trends are identified in MDSS tables and graphs. The shifts and trends as well as bursts and outliers are labeled in the tables. Finally, MDSS generates a daily alert matrix for each MTF by automatically running the DCD algorithms for the illness and injury categories produced by MDSS.