Syndrome Surveillance Data – Enabling Outbreak Detection
In the past decade or so, the world has had its fair share of pandemic scares. From the avian flu to H1N1, quickly spreading diseases that could potentially land people in the hospital, or even kill those with weak immune systems are a terrifying prospect for American citizens. It is the responsibility of public health departments and hospitals to monitor community health, and educate people about the impending risk of outbreaks in a certain area, but this is very hard to do with fragmented medical records and record keeping systems that make sharing information between agencies difficult. Syndrome surveillance data is one way that health organizations are working to combat this problem.
If you’ve never heard of syndrome surveillance data before, you should know that it is a system for electronically recording and monitoring the existence of patterns in diagnoses for a certain area. This means that by sharing data about the illnesses and symptoms that they are seeing come in, hospitals and doctors will have the ability to detect outbreaks before they reach a life threatening level in a certain area. This type of system would make it much easier to inform the public long before fatalities became part o the equation.
In the past, syndrome surveillance data has been used mostly to investigate the causes and sources of outbreaks after they have already occurred. However, the government is looking into ways that these electronic data entry systems can be put to use to actually stop the outbreaks before they occur. Imagine if, by entering in the symptoms of patients as they walk through the door, hospitals could communicate with each other about escalation of a certain condition, and issue quarantines and health warnings before they reached a critical point. This would improve the health of people all over the world.
Right now, the use of syndrome surveillance data is in its earliest stages, and has not been implemented on a national or even regional scale. This is unfortunate, as a system like this has the potential to revolutionize the way that public health departments and organizations inform their communities about potential threats. One of the biggest barriers to implementation of these kinds of systems is that it is so important to have software that will provide enough details to health care professionals, while also protecting the patient’s identity and privacy as much as possible. Also, funding is needed for accurate implementation.
