Abstract
BackgroundEarly threat detection and situational awareness are vital to achieving a comprehensive and accurate view of health-related events for federal, state, and local health agencies. Key to this are public health and syndromic surveillance systems that can analyze large data sets to discover patterns, trends, and correlations of public health significance. In 2020, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) evaluated its public health surveillance system and identified areas for improvement.MethodsUsing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems, we assessed the ability of the Praedico Surveillance System to perform public health surveillance for a variety of health issues and evaluated its performance compared to an enterprise data solution (VA Corporate Data Warehouse), legacy surveillance system (VA ESSENCE) and a national, collaborative syndromic surveillance platform (CDC NSSP BioSense).ResultsReview of system attributes found that the system was simple, flexible, and stable. Representativeness, timeliness, sensitivity, and Predictive Value Positive were acceptable but could be further improved. Data quality issues and acceptability present challenges that potentially affect the overall usefulness of the system.ConclusionsPraedico is a customizable surveillance and data analytics platform built on big data technologies. Functionality is straightforward, with rapid query generation and runtimes. Data can be graphed, mapped, analyzed, and shared with key decision makers and stakeholders. Evaluation findings suggest that future development and system enhancements should focus on addressing Praedico data quality issues and improving user acceptability. Because Praedico is designed to handle big data queries and work with data from a variety of sources, it could be enlisted as a tool for interdepartmental and interagency collaboration and public health data sharing. We suggest that future system evaluations include measurements of value and effectiveness along with additional organizations and functional assessments.
Highlights
Threat detection and situational awareness are vital to achieving a comprehensive and accurate view of health-related events for federal, state, and local health agencies
Considerable time and resources have been spent by federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as state and local health jurisdictions to develop public health surveillance systems in use today [3]
Methods & analysis The operation of Praedico was assessed by Veterans Health Administration (VHA) epidemiologists who are subject matter experts (SMEs) in infectious diseases, surveillance, and public health informatics, using criteria from CDC’s 2001 Updated Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems [19]
Summary
Threat detection and situational awareness are vital to achieving a comprehensive and accurate view of health-related events for federal, state, and local health agencies. Key to this are public health and syndromic surveillance systems that can analyze large data sets to discover patterns, trends, and correlations of public health significance. Public health surveillance involves the ongoing collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data. These data are used to plan and implement health policy, evaluate public health practice, track diseases, disseminate information and monitor naturally occurring or Lucero‐Obusan et al BMC Public Health (2022) 22:272 intentional biological and environmental threats [1,2,3].
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