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...

Emergency Department Chief Complaints have been used to detect the size and the spread of disease outbreaks in the past. Chief complaints are readily available in digital formats and provide a good data source for syndromic surveillance. This paper reports our findings on the identification of the distribution of a few syndromes over time using the Victorian Syndromic Surveillance (SynSurv) dat...

BACKGROUND Syndromic surveillance system has great advantages in promoting the early detection of epidemics and reducing the necessities of disease confirmation, and it is especially effective for surveillance in resource poor settings. However, most current syndromic surveillance systems are established in developed countries, and there are very few reports on the development of an electronic ...

Surveillance, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “is the cornerstone of public health security” [1]. In many developing countries, human, laboratory, and infrastructure limitations impede effective surveillance [2–5]. Such countries likely do not meet core surveillance and response capacities under the new International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) [6], which require detection o...

BACKGROUND Syndromic surveillance systems can potentially be used to detect a bioterrorist attack earlier than traditional surveillance, by virtue of their near real-time analysis of relevant data. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve analysis using the area under the curve (AUC) as a comparison metric has been recommended as a practical evaluation tool for syndromic surveillance system...

Introduction The New York City (NYC) syndromic surveillance system has monitored syndromes from NYC emergency department (ED) visits since 2001, using the temporal and spatial scan statistic in SaTScan for aberration detection. Since our syndromic system was initiated, alternative methods have been proposed for outbreak identification. Our goal was to evaluate methods for outbreak detection and...

BACKGROUND Given the threat of bioterrorism and the increasing availability of electronic data for surveillance, surveillance systems for the early detection of illnesses and syndromes potentially related to bioterrorism have proliferated. PURPOSE To critically evaluate the potential utility of existing surveillance systems for illnesses and syndromes related to bioterrorism. DATA SOURCES D...