Technical Description of RODS: A Real-time Public Health Surveillance System

Abstract

This report describes the design and implementation of the Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) system, a computer-based public health surveillance system for early detection of disease outbreaks. Hospitals send RODS data from clinical encounters over virtual private networks and leased lines using the Health Level 7 (HL7) message protocol. The data are sent in real time. RODS automatically classifies the registration chief complaint from the visit into one of seven syndrome categories using Bayesian classifiers. It stores the data in a relational database, aggregates the data for analysis using data warehousing techniques, applies univariate and multivariate statistical detection algorithms to the data, and alerts users of when the algorithms identify anomalous patterns in the syndrome counts. RODS also has a Web-based user interface that supports temporal and spatial analyses. RODS processes sales of over-the-counter health care products in a similar manner but receives such data in batch mode on a daily basis. RODS was used during the 2002 Winter Olympics and currently operates in two states-Pennsylvania and Utah. It has been and continues to be a resource for implementing, evaluating, and applying new methods of public health surveillance.

A susceptible-infected model of early detection of respiratory infection outbreaks on a background of influenza

“…Critical for real time surveillance are two components: data collection and data analysis. Indeed today, there are several real time outbreak monitoring systems in place in major metropolitan cities Tsui et al, 2003;Lewis et al, 2002;Lober et al, 2002;Reis et al, 2003). Despite such progressive efforts, the state of the practice for detecting temporal abnormalities in surveillance data is not adequate.…”

“…The methodology presented here represents a fusion among the developing methods of syndromic surveillance Tsui et al, 2003;Lewis et al, 2002;Lober et al, 2002;Reis et al, 2003;Greenko et al, 2003;Goldenberg et al, 2002), the notion of transients in health and disease (Mohtashemi and Levins, 2001;Mohtashemi, 2001) and well-established concepts and approaches in mathematical epidemiology (Bailey, 1967;Edelstein-Keshet, 1988;Anderson and May, 1992).…”

Privacy-Preserving Schema Reuse

“…Another possible issue is the policies of schema owners that require hiding a part of schemas under some circumstances. For instance, a hospital needs to hide the personal information of its patient records due to legal concerns [12], or an enterprise makes an agreement with its clients about the privacy of business practices [13]. Since schema reuse only…”

Risk-based decision making for staggered bioterrorist attacks : resource allocation and risk reduction in "reload" scenarios.

“…It attempts to estimate the location, height, and time of an airborne anthrax release, as well as the number of spores. The observables consist of respiratory visits to emergency departments, as might be obtainable from syndromic surveillance systems such as RODS [10]. The model that relates these observables to the characteristics of the outbreak includes a Gaussian dispersion plume [11], Glassman's infection relation [12], and a log-normal distribution of incubation periods, with dose-dependent mean and standard deviation.…”