International Society for Disease Surveillance

Syndromic Surveillance from Chief Complaints

This page in progress - email Wendy Chapman for more information.

 I. Consensus Syndrome Definitions

II. Papers Related to Syndromic Surveillance From Chief Complaints

III. Chief Complaint Classifiers

IV. Chief Complaint Repository

V. Education About Syndromic Surveillance From Chief Complaints

 

I. Consensus Syndrome Definitions

We catalogued clinical condition-syndrome pairs for ten surveillance systems across the United States and representatives for those systems came to consensus on definitions of the four syndromes monitored by the majority of the ten participating systems: Respiratory, Gastrointestinal, Constitutional, and Influenza-like Illness (ILI).

Browse Syndrome Definitions or check out the links below for resources related to the syndrome definitions.

1.a. Descriptions of generating syndrome definitions

 

1.b. Ontology of syndromes for chief complaints

 

1.c. Chief complaint classification using the syndrome definitions

 

1.d. How the consensus syndrome definitions are being used

 

II. Papers Related to Syndromic Surveillance From Chief Complaints

Chief Complaint Classification

  • Dara J, Dowling JN, Travers D, Cooper GF, Chapman WW. Evaluation of preprocessing techniques for chief complaint classification. J Biomed Inform2007 Nov 29.
  • Olszewski RT, editor. Bayesian classification of triage diagnoses for the early detection of epidemics. FLAIRS Conference; 2003; St. Augustine, FL.
  • Brown P, Halasz S, Cochrane DG, Allegra JR, Goodall CR, Tse S. Optimizing performance of an ngram method for classifying emergency department visits into the respiratory syndrome. Advances in Disease Surveillance2007;2:1.
  • Espino JU, Dowling J, Levander J, Sutovsky P, Wagner MM, Cooper GF. SyCo: A Probabilistic Machine Learning Method for Classifying Chief Complaints into Symptom and Syndrome Categories. Advances in Disease Surveillance2007;2:5.
  • Chapman W, Christensen L, Wagner M, Haug P, Ivanov O, Dowling J, et al. Classifying free-text triage chief complaints into syndromic categories with natural language processing. Artif Intell Med2005 Jan;33(1):31-40.
  • Lu HM, Zeng D, Trujillo L, Komatsu K, Chen H. Ontology-enhanced automatic chief complaint classification for syndromic surveillance. J Biomed Inform2008 Apr;41(2):340-56.
  • Sniegoski CA. Automated syndromic classification of chief complaint records. Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest2004;25(1):68-75.
  • Scholer MJ, Ghneim GS, Wu SW, Westlake M, Travers DA, Waller AE, et al. Defining and applying a method for improving the sensitivity and specificity of an Emergency Department early detection system. Proc 2007 AMIA Fall Symposium2007.
  • Thompson DA, Eitel D, Fernandes CM, Pines JM, Amsterdam J, Davidson SJ. Coded Chief Complaints--automated analysis of free-text complaints. Acad Emerg Med2006 Jul;13(7):774-82.
  • Lu HM, King CC, Wu TS, Shih FY, Hsiao JY, Zeng D, et al. Chinese Chief Complaint Classification for Syndromic Surveillance. Lecture Notes in Computer Science2007;4506:11-22.
  • Brown P, Oktay C, Cevik AA, Kilicaslan I, Goodall CR, Halasz S, et al. Sensitivity and Specificity of an Ngram Method for Classifying Emergency Department Visits into the Respiratory Syndrome in the Turkish Language. Advances in Disease Surveillance2007;4:44.
  • Brown P, Morabito G, Halasz S, Goodall CR, Cochrane DG, Tartaglino B, et al. The Performance of a NGram Classifier for Patients' Chief Complaint Based on a Computerized Pick List Entry and Free Text in an Italian Emergency Department. Advances in Disease Surveillance2007;4:45.
  • Travers D, Shiying W, Scholer MJ, Westlake M, Waller A, McCalla AL. Evaluation of a Chief Complaint Pre-Processor for Biosurveillance. AMIA 2007 Symposium Proceedings2007:736-40.
  • Chang HG, Cochrane DG, T. B, Allegra JR, Smith PF. ICD9 as a surrogate for chart review in the validation of a chief complaint syndromic surveillance system. Advances in Disease Surveillance2006;1:11.
  • Chapman W, Dowling J, Wagner M. Classification of emergency department chief complaints into seven syndromes: a retrospective analysis of 527,228 patients. Ann Emerg Med2005;46:445-55.
  • Chang HG, Cochrane DG, T B, R. AJ, Smith PF, editors. Validation of a syndromic system based on patients' chief complaints using chart review. National Syndromic Surveillance Conference; 2004; Boston, MA.
  • Travers D, Shiying W, Scholer MJ, Westlake M, Waller A, McCalla AL. Evaluation of a Chief Complaint Pre-Processor for Biosurveillance. AMIA 2007 Symposium Proceedings. 2007:736-40.
  • Espino JU, Dowling J, Levander J, Sutovsky P, Wagner MM, Cooper GF. SyCo: A Probabilistic Machine Learning Method for Classifying Chief Complaints into Symptom and Syndrome Categories. Advances in Disease Surveillance. 2007;2:5.

 

Syndrome Definitions/Categories/Vocabularies for Chief Complaints

  • Hales C, Coberly J, Tokars J. Defining clinical condition categories for biosurveillance. Adv Dis Surveill2007;4:95.
  • Thompson DA, Eitel D, Fernandes CM, Pines JM, Amsterdam J, Davidson SJ. Coded Chief Complaints--automated analysis of free-text complaints. Acad Emerg Med. 2006 Jul;13(7):774-82.
  • Elkin PL, Brown SH, Balas A, Temesgen Z, Wahner-Roedler D, Froehling D, et al. Biosurveillance evaluation of SNOMED CT's Terminology (BEST Trial): Coverage of chief complaints. International J Med Inform. 2008:(in press).
  • Chang HG, Chen JH, Cochrane D, Allegra J, Smith P. The Use of Sub-syndromes to Investigate Peaks in a Syndromic Surveillance System. Acad Emerg Med. 2007 May;14(5 Suppl 1):S179-80.

 

Syndromic Surveillance Using Chief Complaints as Input

  • Heffernan R, Mostashari F, Das D, Karpati A, Kuldorff M, Weiss D. Syndromic surveillance in public health practice, New York City. Emerg Infect Dis2004 May;10(5):858-64.
  • Lawson BM, Fitzhugh EC, Hall SP, Franklin C, Hutwagner LC, Seeman GM, et al. Multifaceted syndromic surveillance in a public health department using the early aberration reporting system. J Public Health Manag Pract2005 Jul-Aug;11(4):274-81.
  • Beitel A, Olson K, Reis B, Mandl K. Use of emergency department chief complaint and diagnostic codes for identifying repiratory illness in a pediatric population. Pediatr Emerg Care2004 Jun;20(6):355-60.
  • Hripcsak G, Soulakis ND, Li L, Morrison FP, Lai AM, Friedman C, et al. Syndromic surveillance using ambulatory electronic health records. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2009 May-Jun;16(3):354-61.


Comparing Chief Complaints Against Other Data for Syndromic Surveillance

  • South BR, Chapman WW, Delisle S, Shen S, Kalp E, Perl T, et al. Optimizing Syndromic Surveillance Text Classifiers for Influenza-like Illness: Does Document Source Matter? Proc 2008 AMIA FallSymposium (under review). 2008.
  • Chapman WW, Dowling JN, Cooper GF, Hauskrecht M, Valko M, editors. A Comparison of Chief Complaints and Emergency Department Reports for Identifying Patients with Acute Lower Respiratory Syndrome. Fifth Annual Syndromic Surveillance Conference; 2006; Baltimore, MD.

III. Chief Complaint Classifiers

IV. Chief Complaint Repository

Chief complaints and their classifications by different systems/people

V. Education About Syndromic Surveillance From Chief Complaints

Previous ISDS Workshop Materials (coming soon)

 

Previous ISDS Conference Talks

 

Tutorials and Slideshows

 

Book Chapters

  • Handbook of Biosurveillance (9780123693785): Michael M. Wagner, Andrew W. Moore, Ron M. Aryel
    • Chapter 17 - Natural Language Processing for Biosurveillance
    • Chapter 23 - Chief Complaints and ICD Codes
  • Chapman WW, Gundlapalli A, South B, Dowling JN. Natural Language Processing for Biosurveillance. In Infectious Disease Informatics and Biosurveillance: Research, Systems, and Case Studies, Springer (in press)