The Distribute Project, Syndromic Surveillance, and the New Paradigm for Public Health Data Sharing and Analysis

• Activity Number: 336
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security
• Author(s): Marc Paladini*+
• Companies: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
• Keywords: syndromic ; public health ; surveillance ; influenza

Abstract

Syndromic surveillance systems typically use non-diagnostic data (e.g. emergency department (ED) chief complaint) to categorize health care encounters into syndromes (e.g. fever and cough as influenza-like illness (ILI)) and look for patterns and anomalies. Although these systems were first developed as early warning systems to detect bioterrorism, many local and state public health jurisdictions routinely use them to monitor and characterize large scale, seasonal disease trends and have found them especially useful for monitoring influenza incidence.

The Distribute system is a communal effort organized by the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) to share summarized syndromic information from local and state health department systems across jurisdictional boundaries and allow them to compare trends. Data shared are totals of ILI-related and all ED visits by visit date, stratified by age group and by 3-digit zip code. ISDS shares data analyses and visualizations with contributing sites and the public. Initial success has enabled further work allowing sites to address issues such as syndrome standardization, signal response and enhanced statistical analysis.