GI Project: Evaluating syndromic surveillance in public health practice

Reviews of the public health response to historical outbreaks of GI illness call consistently for improvements to the public health surveillance. There is not sufficient evidence, however, to determine the effectiveness of specific changes to the existing surveillance infrastructure. The goal of the project is to evaluate empirically how enhancements to public health surveillance systems will impact the effectiveness of these systems in detecting waterborne enteric disease outbreaks. To achieve this goal, we are working on several more specific tasks:

• We build a detailed agent-based simulation model for generating realistic multivariate outbreak signals. This model is parameterized to allow for systematic variation in the outbreak conditions resulting in a wide range of outbreak scenarios.
• Using the simulated data, we evaluate the performance of multiple outbreak detections algorithms commonly used in public health surveillance practice, and explore how various characteristics of the data and the algorithms affect detection performance within the settings of traditional and syndromic surveillance.
• We model the effect of existing outbreak intervention strategies in response to detection, and quantitatively assess it in terms of prevented morbidity, mortality, and cost.

The set of pages pertinent to the project on this wiki is far from being complete, and most pages are related to the details of the simulation model. For the overview of the model, visit the GI Simulation Model Overview page. GI Analysis Pipeline page explains how we analyze detection performance using the simulated data (this part of the project will result in building a rich knowledge base of what determines and affects outbreak detection in public health surveillance and links it with BioSTORM project). The full list of pages in the GI Project category is presented below.

List of all pages by category

CategoryGiProject, CategoryGiGeneral