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The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) is pleased to announce the fifth annual Syndromic Surveillance Conference – “Putting Theory into Practice”. The conference will highlight recent advances in the method and the practice of automated population and environmental health monitoring with an emphasis on hypothesis formation and decision making. The conference will examine various practical applications, appropriate and successful interventions, and early efforts in outcomes measurements. In previous years, over 400 attendees from the public health community and disciplines of epidemiology, emergency and infectious disease medicine, biostatistics, medical informatics, and others have attended the conference. We look forward to another excellent conference this year and we invite you to join us in Baltimore.

Agenda

Conference Track Sessions

Poster Assignments

REQUIRED Release form for all oral presentations and Posters

Pre-Conference Workshop – Agenda – Learning Objectives

Registration (closed)

Hotel Information, Reservations, Directions

Conference Committees

2006 Syndromic Surveillance Conference Agenda
To view the presentations from the Conference, please following the links below.

  • Wednesday, October 18, 2006
    • PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTICE TRACK
      • Special Topics in Influenza Surveillance
      • The Nuts and Bolts of Syndromic Data Generation
      • Biosurveillance Protocols and Outbreak Investigations – Knowing Your Data: Protocols and Investigations
    • ANALYTICS/INFORMATICS TRACK
  • Thursday, October 19, 2006
    • Welcome Remarks, Program Overview, Greeting from the International Society for Disease Surveillance
    • Opening Remarks
    • Keynote Address
    • Plenary Panel Session 1 – Syndromic Surveillance and Pandemic Influenza (Moderator: Julie Pavlin, MD, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences)
      • Don Olson, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
      • Marc Paladini, MPH, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
      • John Brownstein, PhD, Harvard Medical School Department of Pediatrics
      • Lynne Steele, MS, CIC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
      • Antoine Flahault, MD, PhD, Department of Public Health, AP-HP, Hôpital Tenon
      • Questions
    • Automated Data Acquisition and Processing – Record Classification (Moderator: John Allegra)
    • Aberration Detection – Spatial Analysis I (Moderator: Rick Heffernan)
    • Public Health Practice – Surveillance Practice I (Moderator: Kathy Hurt-Mullen)
    • Emerging Priorities and Novel Applications – Pandemic Influenza (Moderator: Duncan Cooper)
    • Evaluation and Performance Testing – System Evaluation (Moderator: James Buehler)
    • Plenary Panel Session 2: Integrating Local, Regional, and National Syndromic Surveillance Efforts (Moderator: Joseph Lombardo, MS, Johns Hopkins U. Applied Physics Laboratory)
      • Julia Gunn, RN, MPH, Boston Public Health Commission
      • Michael Coletta, MPH, State of Georgia Department of Public Health
      • Lynn Steele, MS, CIC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
      • Ken Cox, MD, MPH, United States Air Force Medical Corps, SFS
  • Friday, October 20, 2006
    • Aberration Detection – Spatial Analysis II (Moderator: Ken Kleinman)
    • Aberration Detection – Temporal Analysis I (Moderator: Elena Naumova)
    • Public Health Practice – Surveillance Practice II (Moderator: Lynn Frank)
    • Emerging Priorities and Novel Applications – Environmental Health (Moderator: Herman Tolentino)
    • Evaluation and Performance Testing – Case Definitions and Data Sources (Moderator: Don Goodwin)
    • Automated Data Acquisition and Processing Data Processing and Modeling (Moderator: Uma Marques)
    • Aberration Detection – Temporal Analysis II (Moderator: Jerome Tokars)
    • Public Health Practice – Data and System Evaluation (Moderator: Jackie Coberly)
    • Emerging Priorities and Novel Applications – Post-Disaster and Other Settings (Moderator: Michael Coletta)
    • Evaluation and Performance Testing – Simulation Methods and Studies (Moderator: Ken Mandl)
    • Plenary Panel Session 3: Interacting with Clinical Information Systems for Syndromic Surveillance (Moderator: David Buckeridge, MD, PhD, McGill University)
      • Bill Lober, MD University of Washington
      • Michael Klompas, MD, Harvard Medical School
      • Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, Harvard Medical School
      • Farzad Mostashari, MD, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
    • Plenary Panel Session 4: Research and Practice Highlights
      • Alice Yeung, MPH, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
      • Liselotte Van Asten, MSc, PhD, RIVM (Dutch National Institute for Public Health)
      • Julia Gunn, RN, MPH, Boston Public Health Commission
      • Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Harvard Medical School
    • Awards and Closing Remarks

Pre-Conference Workshop Wednesday, October 18

Agenda – Learning Objectives

Description
The one-day pre-conference workshop to be held on October 18 will expand on previous successful workshops. Sessions will be aimed at both experienced and novice surveillance system users and developers. This year’s workshop will have two tracks, Public Health Practice and Applied Analytics/Informatics. Both tracks will focus on practical applications and will provide “take home” examples of software and methods for participants.

Planned sessions for the Public Health Practice track include:

“The Nuts and Bolts of Syndromic Data Generation,” in which physicians and first responders will describe decision-making and classification protocols underlying chief complaint, discharge diagnosis and other syndromic data sources
Sessions on influenza surveillance including the chronology and epidemiology of the 1976 Fort Dix influenza outbreak by a first-hand investigator; and the how age-specific patterns of influenza-like illness, in combination with viral data, can be used to detect and characterize influenza epidemics

Understanding and responding to emergency department syndromic surveillance data.

In this session we will review biosurveillance response protocols and examine multiple ways of exploring syndromic data. The focus will be on the role the analyst has in understanding syndromic surveillance data and how that helps them decipher signals and anomalies. The session will end with a case study.

A short tabletop exercise demonstrating syndromic surveillance signal detection, investigation and response, including technical obstacles and communication issues

The Applied Analytics/Informatics track will focus on the application of statistics and informatics to routine health monitoring. Planned sessions include:

Choosing and adjusting appropriate alerting algorithms depending on your surveillance objectives, syndromic groupings, and geographic extent
Fusion of various types of evidence using Bayesian networks; explanation and application of concepts for tools to make sense of varied, distributed data streams
Space-time detection of unusual clusters of cases using scan statistics: concepts, implementation, management of data issues
Managing the practical problems of data acquisition, organization, and conditioning under privacy and proprietary restrictions

Attention: Registrants in the ANALYTICS/INFORMATICS TRACK who are bringing their own laptops to the session should download a copy of Martin Kulldorff’s SaTScan from www.satscan.org, a free and fast download prior to the workshop.

Hotel Reservations – A limited number of hotel rooms at a special rate is Hotel Reservations – Attendees are responsible for their own hotel reservations. A limited number of hotel rooms is available for ISDS conference attendees at the special rate of $239/night until September 20, 2006. Please call the Hyatt at 1-888-421-1442 and mention “Syndromic Conference” to reserve your room. The government room rate of $148 per night is available to qualified individuals by calling the Hyatt and mentioning the code “TUFS.” Please note that attendees registering under the government rate will be required to show appropriate identification upon check in. For map and directions, click here.

2006 ISDS Conference Program Committee
Atar Baer – Public Health Seattle & King County
James Buehler – Emory University
Deeanna L. Burleson – US NORTHCOM SG
Dennis G. Cochrane – Emergency Medical Associates of New Jersey
Michael A. Coletta – Virginia Department of Health
Duncan Cooper –Health Protection Agency, UK
Kenneth L. Cox – Department of Defense, Health Affairs
John O. Davies-Cole – District of Columbia Department of Health
Lynn L Frank – Former Chief of Operations, DHHS, Montgomery County, Maryland
Donald J. Goodwin – Air Force Research Laboratory
Julia E. Gunn – Boston Public Health Commission
Rick Heffernan – New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Kathy J. Hurt-Mullen – Department of Health and Human Services, Montgomery County, Maryland
Jeff Johnson – San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency
Bill Lober – University of Washington

Julie Pavlin – Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Henry Rolka – Centers for Disease Control National Center for Public Health Informatics

Joe Lombardo – Organizing Chair
Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory

David Buckeridge – Program Chair
McGill University

2006 Pre-conference Workshop Planning Committee
Atar Baer – Public Health-Seattle & King County
Julia Gunn – Boston Public Health Commission
Richard Heffernan – New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Colleen Martin – Centers for Disease Control National Center for Public Health Informatics

Howard Burkom – Workshop Chair
Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory