The United Kingdom (UK) has several national syndromic surveillance systems. The Health Protection Agency (HPA)/NHS Direct syndromic surveillance system uses pre-diagnostic syndromic data from a national telephone helpline, while the HPA/QSurveillance national surveillance system uses clinical diagnosis data extracted from general practitioner (GP)-based clinical information systems. Data from ...

Introduction Drug sales data as an early indicator in syndromic surveillance has attracted particular interest in recent years (1, 2), however previous studies were mostly conducted in developed countries or areas. In China, many people (around 60%) choose self-medication as their first option when they encounter a health problem (3), and electronic sales information system is gradually used by...

Introduction The final rules released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services specified the initial criteria for eligible hospitals to qualify for an incentive payment by demonstrating meaningful use of certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology. Syndromic surveillance reporting is one of three public health objectives that eligible hospitals can choose for stage 1. The PHIN ...

Introduction As a participant in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) has worked closely with our statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) and National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) technical staff to collect and transmit emergency department (ED) data from eligible hospitals (EHs) to the NSSP. Our goal is to ensure ...

Objective This roundtable will provide a forum for the syndromic surveillance Community of Practice (CoP) to learn about activities of the BioSense 2.0 User Group (BUG) workgroups that address priority issues in syndromic surveillance. It will be an opportunity to discuss key challenges faced by public health jurisdictions in the era of Meaningful Use and identify further needs and best practic...

PUBLIC HEALTH SURVEILLANCE is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data regarding a health-related event that enables public health authorities to reduce morbidity and mortality.1 Surveillance serves many public health functions—for example, estimating the burden of a disease or injury, portraying the natural history of a condition, determining the ...

Introduction Over several months in 2012, NYC DOHMH syndromic surveillance staff met with directors of all 49 participating EDs in our syndromic system to collect information on their health information systems coding practices [1]. During these interviews, ED directors expressed interest in receiving summary reports of the data they send to the syndromic unit, such as number of ED visits, most...

An evaluation was conducted to determine which syndromic surveillance tools complement traditional surveillance by serving as earlier indicators of influenza activity in Sweden. Web queries, medical hotline statistics, and school absenteeism data were evaluated against two traditional surveillance tools. Cross-correlation calculations utilized aggregated weekly data for all-age, nationwide acti...

Increasing biosurveillance capacity is a public health priority in both the developed and the developing world. Effective syndromic surveillance is especially important if we are to successfully identify and monitor disease outbreaks in their early stages. This paper describes the construction and preliminary evaluation of a syndromic surveillance orientated application ontology designed to fac...

Introduction One of ASTHO’s key goals is to help its jurisdictions meet member needs for technical assistance, including making informed decisions about their syndromic surveillance options. To help them make such decisions, ASTHO worked with Booz Allen to create a decision analysis model, which factors in both a Value of Information (VOI) model and a Return on Investment (ROI) model. The model...