A Retrospective Comparison of Military Health Surveillance Systems: An Example of Respiratory Illness at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego
Abstract
Primary goals of health surveillance in the military include monitoring the health status of military personnel, and detecting outbreaks of naturally occurring and bioterrorism-related epidemics. Two near real-time automated surveillance systems currently in use by the Department of Defense are the Medical Data Surveillance System (MDSS) and the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE). Both prototype systems are passive surveillance systems, using already collected diagnostic data reported as primary ICD-9 codes on automated medical encounter records. Although MDSS and ESSENCE use the same data source (i.e., ICD-9 codes entered into the Ambulatory Data System), their assignment of ICD-9 codes into disease/syndrome categories differs, and each system uses a different outbreak detection algorithm. The purpose of this retrospective research was to compare the two systems surveillance trends and potential outbreak detection of respiratory illness at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego, over the 64 weeks of July 29, 2002, to October 19, 2003. For additional comparison, data from traditional active surveillance of febrile respiratory illness (FRI) conducted on-site at MCRD are also included. Results of the present study describe counts of respiratory illness captured by MDSS and ESSENCE and active FRI surveillance, as well as each system's outbreak detection performance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 04, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA435955
Entities
People
- Anthony W. Hawksworth
- Brian P. Murphy
- Bruce K. Bohnker
- Hilary Kleiner
- Susan I. Woodruff
- Wendi Bownman
Organizations
- Naval Health Research Center