Most disasters are readily identifiable but health care disasters may not be as readily recognized, particularly early in their evolution. Syndromic surveillance, one kind of health care disaster, is the term coined for systems that use data that precede diagnosis to recognize disease outbreaks with sufficient specificity to warrant a public health response. Algorithms designed for early detection of health care disasters that rely solely on temporal trends may not be specific enough and several investigators have begun to incorporate geospatial clustering into the pattern recognition algorithms in order to improve specificity. Knowing the specific geographic location of the patient's home address would allow easy identification of a patient in many cases, however, we propose to develop and characterize pattern recognition algorithms that operate on deidentified data in order to protect patients' privacy. We will carry out this work using actual data from two different cities in order to increase the chance that the approach developed can be generalized. The overall approach would be to utilize established pattern recognition algorithms developed at Children's Hospital in Boston, and modify them as needed to accommodate use of deidentified data. Then we will compare the detection characteristics of the algorithm using identifiable data and deidentified data in order to determine the effect of using deidentified data.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Type
Exploratory/Developmental Grants (R21)
Project #
1R21LM007970-01
Application #
6673408
Study Section
Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee (BLR)
Program Officer
Florance, Valerie
Project Start
2003-09-30
Project End
2006-09-29
Budget Start
2003-09-30
Budget End
2004-09-29
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2003
Total Cost
$606,068
Indirect Cost
Name
Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
Department
Internal Medicine/Medicine
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
603007902
City
Indianapolis
State
IN
Country
United States
Zip Code
46202
Bourgeois, Florence T; Shannon, Michael W; Valim, Clarissa et al. (2010) Adverse drug events in the outpatient setting: an 11-year national analysis. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf 19:901-10
Bourgeois, Florence T; Mandl, Kenneth D; Valim, Clarissa et al. (2009) Pediatric adverse drug events in the outpatient setting: an 11-year national analysis. Pediatrics 124:e744-50