2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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188

ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

Validation of the Michigan’s Public Health Syndromic 
System Using Electronic Medical Records
Sandhya Swarnavel*1, Jim Collins2 and Corrine Miller3

1Health System Information Fellow (HSIP), Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, MI, USA; 2Director, Communicable 
Diseases Division, Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, MI, USA; 3State Epidemiologist and Director, Bureau of 
Disease Control, Prevention and Epidemiology, Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, MI, USA

Objective
Validation of the syndromic system by comparing the chief 

complaint data to the electronic medical records (EMR) of a tertiary 
hospital.

Introduction
Michigan has been collecting chief complaint data from emergency 

departments statewide to support situational awareness activities 
related to communicable disease since 2004. We validated the 
syndromic system by comparing the chief complaint data to the 
electronic medical records (1,2,3) of a tertiary hospital in southeast 
Michigan to better understand the utility of the system for non-
communicable disease situations.

Methods
We examined the Michigan Syndromic Surveillance System 

(MSSS) free text chief complaint data that were submitted over a 
3-month period from December 2013 to February 2014. For a pilot 
test, we extracted a subset of HL7 messages (4) with unique identifiers 
and linked the MSSS data to the medical records of Hospital A. 
We compared the agreement of the MSSS data to ICD codes in the 
hospital EMR.

Results
A total of 22,336 HL7 message transactions were received during 

the three months. Of 144 HL7 messages in the pilot, 33 (22.9%) 
contained incomplete data and could not be linked to the EMR . 
Of the remaining 111 records that could be linked to the EMR, 5 
self-reported chief complaints did not correlate with the ICD codes. 
The percent positive agreement was 94.34%.The results of the 400 
randomized syndromic chief complaints will be presented, with 
further analysis of data quality, data completeness and accuracy.

Conclusions
Findings of this study will help determine the accuracy of the 

automated classification of data based on chief complaints. This 
study can add confidence in planning for public health preparedness 
activities and situational awareness.

Keywords
Validation; Syndromic System; Electronic Medical Records; HL7 
messages

Acknowledgments

This report was supported by an appointment to the Health System 
Integration Fellowship Program administered by the Council of State 
and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and funded by the Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevent (CDC) Cooperative Agreement Number 
5U38HM000414. The other partners in this project are ASTHO, 
NACCHO and PHII.

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*Sandhya Swarnavel
E-mail: SwarnavelS@michigan.gov    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e207, 201