Public health systems have relied on public health surveillance to plan health programs, and extensive surveillance systems exist for health behaviors and chronic disease. Mental health has used a separate data collection system that emphasizes measurement of disease prevalence and health care use. In recent years, efforts to integrate these systems have included adding chronic disease measures...

The US does not have a unified system for surveillance of violent deaths. This report describes the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), a system for collecting data on all violent deaths (homicides, suicides, accidental firearms deaths, deaths of undetermined intent, and deaths from legal intervention, excluding legal executions) in participating states. The NVDRS centralizes data ...

Secondary use of clinical health data for near real-time public health surveillance presents challenges surrounding its utility due to data quality issues. Data used for real-time surveillance must be timely, accurate and complete if it is to be useful; if incomplete data are used for surveillance, understanding the structure of the incompleteness is necessary. Such data are commonly aggregated...

Using data that, to our knowledge, have not been used before for this purpose, we examined 9,231 opposite-sex intimate partner violence (IPV) calls for law enforcement assistance recorded in the Compstat system of a large U.S. city. Although women were the predominant victims, injuries were documented more often for men. Only about 1% of incidents were considered a restraining order violation, ...

BACKGROUND Because both public health surveillance and action are crucial, the authors initiated meetings at regional and national levels to assess and reform surveillance and action systems. These meetings emphasized improved epidemic preparedness, epidemic response, and highlighted standardized assessment and reform. METHODS To standardize assessments, the authors designed a conceptual fram...

More than a decade into the 21(st) century, the ability to effectively monitor community health status, as well as forecast, detect, and respond to disease outbreaks and other events of public health significance, remains a major challenge. As an issue that affects population health, economic stability, and global security, the public health surveillance enterprise warrants the attention of dec...