Developing syndrome definitions based on consensus and current use.
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.
Chapman
Wendy W
WW
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. wendy.w.chapman@gmail.com
Dowling
John N
JN
Baer
Atar
A
Buckeridge
David L
DL
Cochrane
Dennis
D
Conway
Michael A
MA
Elkin
Peter
P
Espino
Jeremy
J
Gunn
Julia E
JE
Hales
Craig M
CM
Hutwagner
Lori
L
Keller
Mikaela
M
Larson
Catherine
C
Noe
Rebecca
R
Okhmatovskaia
Anya
A
Olson
Karen
K
Paladini
Marc
M
Scholer
Matthew
M
Sniegoski
Carol
C
Thompson
David
D
Lober
Bill
B
D003141:Communicable Diseases; D006126:Group Processes; D006801:Humans; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D013577:Syndrome; D014481:United States
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