Background: A dengue fever outbreak occured in French Guiana in 2006. The objectives were to study the value of a syndromic surveillance system set up within the armed forces, compared to the traditional clinical surveillance system during this outbreak, to highlight issues involved in comparing military and civilian surveillance systems and to discuss the interest of syndromic surveillance for...

BACKGROUND The science of syndromic surveillance is still very much in its infancy. While a number of syndromic surveillance systems are being evaluated in the US, very few have had success thus far in predicting an infectious disease event. Furthermore, to date, the majority of syndromic surveillance systems have been based primarily in emergency department settings, with varying levels of enh...

Introduction Patients’ chief complaints (CCs) as a common data source, has been widely used in syndromic surveillance due to its timeliness, accuracy and availability (1). For automated syndromic surveillance, CCs always classified into predefined syndromic categories to facilitate subsequent data aggregation and analysis. However, in rural China, most outpatient doctors recorded the informatio...

BACKGROUND Although an increasing number of studies are documenting uses of syndromic surveillance by front line public health, few detail the value added from linking syndromic data to public health decision-making. This study seeks to understand how syndromic data informed specific public health actions during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. METHODS Semi-structured telephone interviews were conduct...

The science of surveillance is rapidly evolving due to changes in public health information and preparedness as national security issues, new information technologies and health reform. As the Emergency Department has become a much more utilized venue for acute care, it has also become a more attractive data source for disease surveillance. In recent years, influenza surveillance from the Emerg...

Timely detection of an inhalational anthrax outbreak is critical for clinical and public health management. Syndromic surveillance has received considerable investment, but little is known about how it will perform relative to routine clinical case finding for detection of an inhalational anthrax outbreak. We conducted a simulation study to compare clinical case finding with syndromic surveilla...

Results Syndromic surveillance reporting Routine weekly surveillance bulletins are produced from each syndromic system: these reports present the current indicator trends and encapsulate the main summary findings from the weeks surveillance, providing a number of key messages for health professionals.1 Heatwave surveillance Syndromic surveillance plays an important part in assessing the health ...

BACKGROUND Syndromic surveillance promotes the early detection of diseases outbreaks. Although syndromic surveillance has increased in developing countries, performance on outbreak detection, particularly in cases of multi-stream surveillance, has scarcely been evaluated in rural areas. OBJECTIVE This study introduces a temporal simulation model based on healthcare-seeking behaviors to evalua...

Introduction The US Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that after October 1, 2015, all HIPAA covered entities must transition from using International Classification of Diseases version 9 (ICD9) codes to using version 10 (ICD-10) codes (www.cms.gov). This will impact public health surveillance entities that receive, analyze, and report ICD-9 encoded data. Public health agencie...