Epi Class 13 Flashcards
Surveillance
Ongoing systematic collection of health data
– Monitoring health events: detect sudden changes & follow secular (long-term) trends
– Priority setting, planning, implementing, and evaluating disease (investigation,
control, and prevention)
Biosurveillance
term used more commonly (often with anti-terrorism) as it is less frightening to the public that “surveillance”
“the process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information related to all-hazards threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, or plant health to achieve early detection and warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of an incident, and to enable better decision-making at all levels”
Requirements for Biosurveillance
- Case detection (find one patient—requires a reporting mechanism)
- Cluster detection (detect unusual patterns—requires baseline epidemiological
data) - Signal validation (confirm need for a public health response—requires data
integration) - Event characterization (outbreak investigation—requires data collection and laboratory analysis)
- Notification and communication (such as notifiable disease reporting from clinicians
and labs) - Quality control and improvement (such as ensuring confidentiality of data and
monitoring performance)
Types of Epidemiological Surveillance
Active surveillance
Passive surveillance
Sentinel surveillance
Syndromic surveillance
Active surveillance
public health agency reaches out to local healthcare providers to request information
Passive surveillance
local healthcare providers provide reports to a public health organization (either voluntary reports or notifications mandated by law)
Sentinel surveillance
a public health organization selects a sample of healthcare providers and receives regular reports from them; active surveillance of a larger number of providers can be initiated if an outbreak appears to be occurring
Syndromic surveillance
asking for a report to be submitted when a patient has a particular set of symptoms, rather than requiring a formal laboratory diagnosis
Emerging Surveillance Methods
Community-based surveillance
Crowd-sourced surveillance
Community-based surveillance
community health volunteers (CHVs) assist with data collection and reporting of a limited number of syndromes
Crowd-sourced surveillance
an emerging technique that scans reports from Twitter and other social media to detect outbreaks early
Common Surveillance Problems
- Reports often are made only for patients who have sought care from formal healthcare providers
- Healthcare workers have little incentive to report cases
- Case definitions may be unclear
- Incidence rates (# new cases / # population) can be impossible to calculate if the denominator is unknown
Surveillance Biases
- Attendance patterns (media storms!)
- Diagnostic methods (more testing = more diagnoses, even of subclinical infections)
- Screening (“seek and ye shall find”)
• Reporting propensity (do people really report all notifiable diseases?)
– Notification delays
– Failure of the agency to report back
Research Approaches
• Implementation (process) research: What policies would improve health services?
• Evaluation (outcomes) research: Do implemented policies work? Do they improve
patient outcomes and reduce costs?
What does implementation (process) research ask?
What policies would improve health services?
