2011 Topics and Detailed Track Descriptions

<Back to abstract submission

The 2011 ISDS Annual Conference will accept oral presentation, panel, and poster submissions in the following four tracks. Topics that address the conference theme ("Building the Future of Public Health Surveillance") and/or any of the additional topics listed below are especially encouraged.

Topics to consider for abstract submission may include but are not limited to:

• Non-traditional data sources and novel applications for health surveillance
• Moving beyond disease surveillance to monitor the overall health of a population (including applications to drug abuse, injury, crime, poverty, etc.)
• Bridging the boundaries between federal, state, and local public health efforts
• Novel methods, evaluations and case studies for early outbreak detection
• Bridging the gaps between the theory and practice of surveillance
• Tools for public health collaboration, communication and decision support
• Data acquisition and flow:  availability, interoperability, etc.
• Novel methods, technologies, uses applications and data sources for public health
• Applying health and disease surveillance methods and systems in the developing world and other low-resource settings
• Meaningful Use and beyond:  buidling a smarter health system
• Applications to chronic disease (prevention, management, burden of disease calculations, risk factors) at the group and population levels
• Facilitating international and cross-border cooperation and collaboration
• Monitoring of emerging patterns of drug resistant strains and newly emerging illnesses
• Food and water quality monitoring; chemical and biological sensors; participatory sensing
• Nosocomial infections; drug interactions and adverse events
• Data quality, collection, aggregation and integration
• Post-marketing pharmacovigilance and evaluation of the efficacy of vaccines and other interventions
• Animal and plant health surveillance
• Surveillance of preventive measures in clinical practice
• Improving the end-user experience:  enhancements, visualizations and training

Detailed Track Descriptions

During the submission process, authors will be asked to select a track to place their submission in.  Please use the detailed track descriptions below to help categorize your work. 

Analytical Methods

This track is focused on important and novel advances in the field of surveillance methodologies and analytical approaches. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Statistical methods and tools for analyzing and interpreting data
• Integrating evidence from multiple sources
• Analytic evaluation of surveillance components
• Decision support
• New algorithms and evaluation of existing algorithms for cluster and event detection
• Pattern recognition algorithms
• Estimating morbidity and impact
• Innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology
• Evaluation of algorithms and systems through epidemic simulation
• Integration of mathematical modeling and statistical analyses

Public Health Surveillance

This track is focused on improving the daily processes of surveillance, outbreak investigation, management, and response. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Evaluation of surveillance systems
• Outbreak detection, characterization and outbreak management
• Case studies
• Situational awareness
• Integrating surveillance across multiple data sources
• Contact tracing and network analysis
• Messaging/risk communication (what to say to the public, politicians and media with syndromic systems alerts)
• Linking response with front line health workers
• Novel approaches to communicable diseases surveillance and reporting (e.g., notifiable conditions, MRSA, nosocomial infections)
• Borderless data exchange models (e.g. federated information sharing approaches)
• Legal/ethical issues in syndromic surveillance
• Surveillance in resource-limited settings

Informatics

This track is focused on the technological aspects of electronic health information analysis and exchange and the systems that enable and support these processes.  Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• How clinical information systems can support public health surveillance efforts
• Advances in methods for classifying data
• Natural language processing
• Data visualization methods
• Leveraging Meaningful Use requirements for public health surveillance
• Vocabularies and coding schemas
• System descriptions of real-world solutions to challenging integration problems
• System architectures for limited connectivity environments and disaster surveillance
• Approaches to building interoperable surveillance systems with reusable and multi-use components from open source development and cloud services
• Data integration – acquiring, moving, storing, processing, coding, normalizing, and preparing data for analysis between systems
• System architectures for surveillance in low-resource environments
• System architectures to leverage HIE for public health surveillance

Novel Approaches