Register for the Public Health Practice Webinar for Updates on Meaningful Use and the Distribute ILI-S Project

On Monday, April 25th, from 12:30-1:30 pm EST, the ISDS Public Health Practice Committee will be hosting its regularly scheduled meeting.

Topics of discussion will include:

• An update on the Meaningful Use discussion held at the Distribute Community of Practice Meeting in Atlanta -- Michael Coletta
• A presentation by Don Olson on the Distribute ILI-S Pilot Project:
• "Towards adopting a common influenza-like illness (ILI) syndrome across multiple public health jurisdictions." There are no national standards for classifying emergency department (ED) chief complaint data into syndromes for public health surveillance. Local syndrome definitions allow for regional idiom and coding variations and are often tailored to meet specific public health surveillance needs, making comparisons of trends across regions challenging. The ISDS Distribute Project engages partners from state and local health departments to share de-identified ED data at the aggregate, rather than individual, level. Distribute conducted a pilot study to assess interest, capability, and usefulness of implementing common syndrome concepts and coding across multiple Distribute sites. Six sites provided 4 years of data using a common syndrome definition comprising 3 sub-syndrome components defined by a formal code set -- fever/cough, fever/sore-throat, and flu. The distribution of ILI standardized component sub‑syndromes varied among sites, adding more detail to geographic differences. Adoption of a common syndrome across jurisdictions represents a potential advance in syndromic surveillance practice.

Register for the webinar