ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2017. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution,  
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISDS 2016 Conference Abstracts

Identifying and Communicating the Importance of the 
Variable Nature of SyS Data
Heather Rubino*, David Atrubin and Janet J. Hamilton
Epidemiology, Florida Department of Health, Tallahassee, FL, USA

Objective
This roundtable will provide a forum for national, state, and local 

managers of syndromic surveillance systems to discuss how they 
identify, monitor, and respond to changes in the nature of their data. 
Additionally, this session will focus on the strengths and weakness 
of the syndromic surveillance systems for supporting program 
evaluation and trend analysis. This session will also provide a forum 
where subject matter experts can discuss the ways in which this deep 
understanding of their data can be leveraged to forge and improve 
partnerships with academic partners.

Introduction
As syndromic surveillance systems continue to grow, new 

opportunities have arisen to utilize the data in new or alternative 
ways for which the system was not initially designed. For example, 
in many jurisdictions syndromic surveillance has recently become 
population-based, with 100% coverage of targeted emergency 
department encounters. This makes the data more valuable for real-
time evaluation of public health and prevention programs. There has 
also been increasing pressure to make more data publicly available – 
to the media, academic partners, and the general public.

Keywords
informatics; surveillance; syndromic; evaluation

*Heather Rubino
E-mail: heather.rubino@flhealth.gov

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 9(1):e76, 2017