Abstract
Syndromic surveillance was born out of a practical need that sought to take advantage of emerging technologies and electronic health records for assessment of near-real time data. The journey of modern syndromic surveillance includes radical departures from standard surveillance practices. Although initially received with skepticism, it is now recognized as a valuable complement to other surveillance strategies. The practice of syndromic surveillance requires stakeholder engagement; computing power to support complicated statistical evaluation of large amounts of daily data; parsing text to reveal patterns in daily data; and transforming, analyzing, and visualizing statistical results and patterns in the data for the epidemiologist. The volume of data received and the algorithms applied to these data to reveal potential public health threats required technological advances in order to optimize processes and ensure timely and nimble exploration of data.
Syndromic surveillance represents the synergy of years of public health surveillance, technology, electronic health records, and informatics practice. This chapter will walk through the journey of syndromic surveillance, point out some of the challenges, and highlight the remarkable achievements over the past 15 years. In the end, the reader will have an appreciation of how good informatics practice can be applied to solve real-world problems.
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Coletta, M.A., Ising, A. (2020). Syndromic Surveillance: A Practical Application of Informatics. In: Magnuson, J., Dixon, B. (eds) Public Health Informatics and Information Systems . Health Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41215-9_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41215-9_16
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