title: Developing syndrome definitions based on consensus and current use.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Standardized surveillance syndromes do not exist but would facilitate sharing data among surveillance systems and comparing the accuracy of existing systems. The objective of this study was to create reference syndrome definitions from a consensus of investigators who currently have or are building syndromic surveillance systems.
  
  
  METHODS
  Clinical condition-syndrome pairs were catalogued for 10 surveillance systems across the United States and the representatives of these systems were brought together for a workshop to discuss consensus syndrome definitions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Consensus syndrome definitions were generated for the four syndromes monitored by the majority of the 10 participating surveillance systems: Respiratory, gastrointestinal, constitutional, and influenza-like illness (ILI). An important element in coming to consensus quickly was the development of a sensitive and specific definition for respiratory and gastrointestinal syndromes. After the workshop, the definitions were refined and supplemented with keywords and regular expressions, the keywords were mapped to standard vocabularies, and a web ontology language (OWL) ontology was created.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The consensus definitions have not yet been validated through implementation.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The consensus definitions provide an explicit description of the current state-of-the-art syndromes used in automated surveillance, which can subsequently be systematically evaluated against real data to improve the definitions. The method for creating consensus definitions could be applied to other domains that have diverse existing definitions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. wendy.w.chapman@gmail.com
authors.forename: Wendy W
authors.initials: WW
authors.lastname: Chapman
authors.forename: John N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Dowling
authors.forename: Atar
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Baer
authors.forename: David L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Buckeridge
authors.forename: Dennis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cochrane
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Conway
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Elkin
authors.forename: Jeremy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Espino
authors.forename: Julia E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Gunn
authors.forename: Craig M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Hales
authors.forename: Lori
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hutwagner
authors.forename: Mikaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Keller
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Larson
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Noe
authors.forename: Anya
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Okhmatovskaia
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Olson
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Paladini
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Scholer
authors.forename: Carol
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sniegoski
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Thompson
authors.forename: Bill
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lober
mesh_terms: D003141:Communicable Diseases; D006126:Group Processes; D006801:Humans; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D013577:Syndrome; D014481:United States
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