Infectious Disease Informatics. Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense

About this book

Computer-based infectious disease surveillance systems are capable of real-time or near real-time detection of serious illnesses and potential bioterrorism agent exposures and represent a major step forward in disease surveillance. Infectious Disease Informatics: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense is an in-depth monograph that analyzes and evaluates the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of existing surveillance systems under a unified framework, and presents the first book-length coverage of the subject from an informatics-driven perspective.

Individual chapters consider the state of the art, including the facilitation of data collection, sharing and transmission; a focus on various outbreak detection methods; data visualization and information dissemination issues; and system assessment and other policy issues. Eight chapters then report on several real-world case studies, summarizing and comparing eight syndromic surveillance systems, including those that have been adopted by many public health agencies (e.g., RODS and BioSense). The book concludes with a discussion of critical issues and challenges, with a look to future directions.

This book is an excellent source of current information for researchers in public health and IT. Government public health officials and private-sector practitioners in both public health and IT will find the most up-to-date information available, and students from a variety of disciplines, including public health, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy will get a comprehensive look at the concepts, techniques, and practices of syndromic surveillance.

Written for: Health and information systems academic researchers, and practitioners

Table of contents

Infectious Disease Informatics.- Public Health Syndromic Surveillance Systems.- Syndromic Surveillance Data Sources and Collection.- Data Analysis and Outbreak Detection.- Data Visualization, Information Dissemination and Alerting.- System Assessment and Evaluation.- BioSense System.- Real-time Outbreak Detection System (RODS).- BioPortal.- ESSENCE Syndromic Surveillance System.- New York City Syndromic Surveillance Systems.- Early Aberration Reporting System.- Argus.- HealthMap Project.- Challenges and Future Directions.- References.- Subject Index.