Objective 1. To derive and validate an accurate clinical prediction model (“home score”) to estimate a patient’s risk of group A streptococcal (GAS) pharyngitis before a health care visit based only on history and real-time local biosurveillance, and to compare its accuracy to traditional clinical prediction models composed of history and physical exam features. 2. To examine the impact of a ho...

Introduction Health care information is a fundamental source of data for biosurveillance, yet configuring EHRs to report relevant data to health departments is technically challenging, labor intensive, and often requires custom solutions for each installation. Public health agencies wishing to deliver alerts to clinicians also must engage in an endless array of one-off systems integrations. Des...

Internet-based surveillance methods for vector-borne diseases (VBDs) using "big data" sources such as Google, Twitter, and internet newswire scraping have recently been developed, yet reviews on such "digital disease detection" methods have focused on respiratory pathogens, particularly in high-income regions. Here, we present a narrative review of the literature that has examined the performan...

Introduction The evaluation of biosurveillance system components is a complex, multi-objective decision that requires consideration of a variety of factors. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis provides a methodology to assist in the objective analysis of these types of evaluation by creating a mathematical model that can simulate decisions. This model can utilize many types of data, both quantitat...

Introduction Biosurveillance Portal (BSP) is a web-based enterprise environment that is aimed to facilitate international collaboration, communication, and information-sharing in support of the detection, management, and mitigation of biological events in Korea. In Oct 2013, Republic of Korea (ROK) Ministry of National Defense has made the project agreement with United States (US) Department of...

Traditionally, national security has been narrowly defined as the preservation of the state from physical threats. Still, emerging diseases and their pandemic potential pose perhaps an even greater national security threat, particularly in this era of globalization when disease can spread more rapidly than in previous eras. Thirty four percent of all deaths worldwide are now attributable to inf...

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Syndromic surveillance systems that incorporate electronic free-text data have primarily focused on extracting concepts of interest from chief complaint text, emergency department visit notes, and nurse triage notes. Due to availability and access, there has been limited work in the area of surveilling the full text of all electronic note documents compared with more specific document sources. ...

Objective The goal of this project is to identify systems and data streams relevant for infectious disease biosurveillance. This effort is part of a larger project evaluating existing and potential data streams for use in local, national, and international infectious disease surveillance systems with the intent of developing tools to provide decision-makers with timely information to predict, p...

Current efforts to detect covert bioterrorist attacks from increases in hospital visit rates are plagued by the unpredictable nature of these rates. Although many current systems evaluate hospital visit data 1 day at a time, we investigate evaluating multiple days at once to lessen the effects of this unpredictability and to improve both the timeliness and sensitivity of detection. To test this...