ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2018. 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 2018 Conference Abstracts

How do we present messy syndromic surveillance 
data to public health’s partners?
David Atrubin*1, Rosa Ergas2 and Aaron Kite-Powell3
1Florida Department of Health, Tampa, FL, USA; 2Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; 3Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA

Objective
To discuss data disclaimers and caveats that are fundamental to 

sharing syndromic surveillance (SyS) data

Introduction
With increasing awareness of SyS systems, there has been a 

concurrent increase in demand for data from these systems – both 
from researchers and from the media. The opioid epidemic occurring 
in the United States has forced the SyS community to determine 
the best way to present these data in a way that makes sense while 
acknowledging the incompleteness and variability in how the data 
are collected at the hospital level and queried at the user level. While 
significant time and effort are spent discussing optimal queries, 
responsible presentation of the data - including data disclaimers - is 
rarely discussed within the SyS community.

Keywords
data disclaimers; data sharing; variability within the data; syndromic 
surveillance; emergency department data

*David Atrubin
E-mail: david.atrubin@flhealth.gov

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 10(1):e73, 2018