SCM: a practical tool to implement hospital-based syndromic surveillance

• Published in: BMC research notes Vol. 9; no. 1; p. 315
• Main Authors: Ye, Chuchu, Li, Zhongjie, Fu, Yifei, Lan, Yajia, Zhu, Weiping, Zhou, Dinglun, Zhang, Honglong, Lai, Shengjie, Buckeridge, David L., Sun, Qiao, Yang, Weizhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London BioMed Central 18.06.2016; BioMed Central Ltd; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Anniversaries and Special Events; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; China - epidemiology; Communicable diseases; Communicable Diseases, Emerging - epidemiology; Communicable Diseases, Emerging - prevention & control; Data collection; Disease Outbreaks - prevention & control; Epidemics; Health aspects; Hospital Information Systems - statistics & numerical data; Hospitals; Humans; Life Sciences; Medical research; Medicine/Public Health; Public Health; Public Health Surveillance - methods; Reproducibility of Results; Research Article; Sentinel Surveillance; Syndrome; Early warning; Infectious disease; Syndromic surveillance; Mass gatherings; Outbreak detection
• ISSN: 1756-0500; 1756-0500
• DOI: 10.1186/s13104-016-2098-z

Background Syndromic surveillance has been widely used for the early warning of infectious disease outbreaks, especially in mass gatherings, but the collection of electronic data on symptoms in hospitals is one of the fundamental challenges that must be overcome during operating a syndromic surveillance system. The objective of our study is to describe and evaluate the implementation of a symptom-clicking-module (SCM) as a part of the enhanced hospital-based syndromic surveillance during the 41st World Exposition in Shanghai, China, 2010. Methods The SCM, including 25 targeted symptoms, was embedded in the sentinels’ Hospital Information Systems (HIS). The clinicians used SCM to record these information of all the visiting patients, and data were collated and transmitted automatically in daily batches. The symptoms were categorized into seven targeted syndromes using pre-defined criteria, and statistical algorithms were applied to detect temporal aberrations in the data series. Results SCM was deployed successfully in each sentinel hospital and was operated during the 184-day surveillance period. A total of 1,730,797 patient encounters were recorded by SCM, and 6.1 % (105,352 visits) met the criteria of the seven targeted syndromes. Acute respiratory and gastrointestinal syndromes were reported most frequently, accounted for 92.1 % of reports in all syndromes, and the aggregated time-series presented an obvious day-of-week variation over the study period. In total, 191 aberration signals were triggered, and none of them were identified as outbreaks after verification and field investigation. Conclusions SCM has acted as a practical tool for recording symptoms in the hospital-based enhanced syndromic surveillance system during the 41st World Exposition in Shanghai, in the context of without a preexisting electronic tool to collect syndromic data in the HIS of the sentinel hospitals.