Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Timeliness of
f Data Sources
Lynne Dailey, PhD, MPH, BSc
Edith Cowan University
Perth, Western Australia
CoNTENTS
1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Peak Comparison ........................................................................................... 3
1.3 Aberration Detection..................................................................................... 6
1.4 Correlation .................................................................................................... 10
1.5 Data Timeliness and Accuracy .................................................................. 15
1.6 Conclusions................................................................................................... 15
1.7 Future Work.................................................................................................. 18
References............................................................................................................... 18
1.1 Introduction
Successful outbreak detection requires the accurate identification of the
moment when the number of cases has exceeded the number of expected for
a certain period or geographic region (Lemay et al. 2008). New surveillance
methods are being developed and tested to improve the timeliness of disease
outbreak detection. One promising set of approaches is known as
biosurveil-
lance
, wherein various information preceding firm clinical diagnoses of
health events is captured early and rapidly from existing, usually electronic,
data sources, and analyzed frequently to detect signals that might indicate
an outbreak (Hopkins et al. 2003).
Researchers have studied many alternative data sources for biosurveil-
lance, including sales of over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceuticals (Davies
and Finch 2003; Hogan et al. 2003; Najmi and Magruder 2004), emergency
department visits (Lazarus et al. 2002; Lewis et al. 2002; Tsui et al. 2002),
ambulance dispatches (Mostashari et al. 2003), and nurse hotline calls
(Rodman, Frost, and Jakubowski 1998). Data sources used for comparison
include reportable disease cases (Lewis et al. 2002; Mostashari et al. 2003;
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