Evaluation challenges for syndromic surveillance--making incremental progress.
BACKGROUND
The 2003 National Syndromic Surveillance Conference provided an opportunity to examine challenges and progress in evaluating syndromic surveillance systems.


OBJECTIVE
Using the conference abstracts as a focus, this paper describes the status of performance measurement of syndromic surveillance systems and ongoing challenges in system evaluation.


METHODS
Ninety-nine original abstracts were reviewed and classified descriptively and according to their presentation of evaluation attributes.


RESULTS
System evaluation was the primary focus of 35% of the abstracts submitted. Of those abstracts, 63% referenced prospective evaluation methods and 57% reported on outbreak detection. However, no data were provided in 34% of the evaluation abstracts, and only 37% referred to system signals, 20% to investigation of system signals, and 20% to timeliness.


CONCLUSIONS
Although this abstract review is not representative of all current syndromic surveillance efforts, it highlights recent attention to evaluation and the need for a basic set of system performance measures. It also proposes questions to be answered of all public health systems used for outbreak detection.
Sosin
Daniel M
DM
Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, CDC, 1600 Clifton Road, Mailstop D-44, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA. dms8@cdc.gov
DeThomasis
J
J
D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000517:prevention & control*; D015991:Epidemiologic Measurements; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D040442:Public Health Informatics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D014481:United States