Use of Syndromic Surveillance During Epidemics/Pandemics

Use of syndromic surveillance during epidemics and pandemics can be very useful instruments that provide valuable and early insight used in the prevention and control of infection or disease during a public health emergency. According to Hughes et al. (2020), syndromic surveillance can be useful not only to show the impact of a disease but it can monitor for early warning signs and can even provide assurances that the event has not occurred.

Hughes et al. (2020) reviewed how emergency departments obtained symptoms of influenza like illness (ILI) and preliminary diagnoses during influenza season and then the public health system used this data to determine potential influenza in the community. They also found that this process was quicker than waiting for actual test results and therefore allowing for rapid implementation of surveillance activities on the part of public health. Syndromic surveillance can also help to determine if an epidemic is moving from one region to another or expanding into a pandemic.

These data collected from what Samaras et al. (2020) describe as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be used to provide early predictions, efficient treatment, can even be used to encourage vaccination among the community, including alerting providers so they can perform appropriate testing and treatment for their patients.

The future of syndromic surveillance according to Samaras et al. (2020) can be expanded using the Web to collect data and analyze it in a variety of ways. A couple of those ways they mention is to compare disease to the weather, location of disease such as urban or rural areas by considering populations.

References

Hughes, H. E., Edeghere, O., O’Brien, S. J., Vivancos, R., & Elliot, A. J. (2020). Emergency department syndromic surveillance systems: a systematic review. BMC public health. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09949-y

Samaras, L., García-Barriocanal, E., & Sicilia, M. A. (2020). Syndromic surveillance using web data: a systematic review. Innovation in Health Informatics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128190432000022