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Comparative Study
. 2003:2003:215-9.

Telephone triage: a timely data source for surveillance of influenza-like diseases

Jeremy U Espino  1 , William R Hogan, Michael M Wagner
Affiliations
Comparative Study

Telephone triage: a timely data source for surveillance of influenza-like diseases

Jeremy U Espino et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003.

Abstract

We evaluated telephone triage (TT) data for public health early warning systems. TT data is electronically available and contains coded elements that include the demographics and description of a caller's medical complaints. In the study, we obtained emergency room TT data and after hours TT data from a commercial TT software and service company. We compared the timeliness of the TT data with influenza surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control using the cross correlation function. Emergency room TT calls are one to five weeks ahead of surveillance data collected by the CDC.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Syndromic categories for TT data. The number of guidelines in each category is given in parentheses. The guideline descriptions for the respiratory and constitutional categories are shown in italics.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Emergency room TT and CDC influenza surveillance. Each time-series plots weekly counts. ER-TT=emergency room TT influenza calls; CDC-SI=state influenza activity from the CDC; CDC-RI=regional influenza like illness cases from the CDC; and CDC-RC=regional positive cultures from the CDC.
Figure 3
Figure 3
After hours TT and CDC influenza surveillance data. Each time-series plots weekly counts. AH-TT=after hours TT influenza calls. CDC data label abbreviations are the same as in Figure 2.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Cross correlation analysis of TT data and CDC influenza surveillance data. Data label abbreviations are the same as in Figures 2 and 3.
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