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Many municipalities and agencies have piloted syndromic surveillance systems, with many different data sources, including hospital emergency department data, sales of prescription or over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, employee absenteeism, hospital admissions, medical billing or laboratory records, and many others, limited only by ingenuity and data availability.30-32 The New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, for example, routinely uses emergency department chief complaint data (collected overnight and analyzed early each morning), but it has also collected data from many other sources, including pharmaceutical sales and ambulance dispatch data.33 In the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, the ESSENCE II system (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics), which was originally developed for the Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections System (GEIS), combines local military and civilian information and collects such clinical data as emergency department chief complaints, private practice billing codes grouped into syndromes, and veterinary syndromes, as well as employee absenteeism, nurse hotline calls, prescription medications, and over-the-counter medication sales.34 Syndromic surveillance understandably has a number of skeptics, who note, among other valid criticisms, that it has not yet provided advance warning of an outbreak.35 The current situation may be best summarized by Balter and colleagues, based on their experience with emergency department syndromic surveillance for gastrointestinal infections in New York City: Syndromic surveillance signals occur frequently, are difficult to investigate satisfactorily, and should be viewed as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, wellmaintained traditional surveillance systems that rely on strong ties between clinicians and public health authorities.36(p175) While syndromic surveillance shows great promise and may provide valuable information that would be missed by conventional systems, there is still a need for evaluation of these systems to understand which data are best for which situations, how best to interpret these data, and how these sources can be combined to provide a more accurate or complete picture and context. Syndromic surveillance continues to evolve, and its utility as an early warning system should increase with time and experience. It is likely to be especially useful for early warning of unexpected or emerging infections and in those unfortunately all too common situations where the ties between clinicians and public health authorities are not sufficiently strong.
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