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. 2010 Sep-Oct;17(5):595-601.
doi: 10.1136/jamia.2010.003210.

Developing syndrome definitions based on consensus and current use

Wendy W Chapman  1 , John N Dowling, Atar Baer, David L Buckeridge, Dennis Cochrane, Michael A Conway, Peter Elkin, Jeremy Espino, Julia E Gunn, Craig M Hales, Lori Hutwagner, Mikaela Keller, Catherine Larson, Rebecca Noe, Anya Okhmatovskaia, Karen Olson, Marc Paladini, Matthew Scholer, Carol Sniegoski, David Thompson, Bill Lober
Affiliations

Developing syndrome definitions based on consensus and current use

Wendy W Chapman et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010 Sep-Oct.

Erratum in

  • Correction.
    [No authors listed] [No authors listed] J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2023 Dec 22;31(1):281. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocad155. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2023. PMID: 37757460 Free PMC article. No abstract available.

Abstract

Objective: Standardized surveillance syndromes do not exist but would facilitate sharing data among surveillance systems and comparing the accuracy of existing systems. The objective of this study was to create reference syndrome definitions from a consensus of investigators who currently have or are building syndromic surveillance systems.

Design: Clinical condition-syndrome pairs were catalogued for 10 surveillance systems across the United States and the representatives of these systems were brought together for a workshop to discuss consensus syndrome definitions.

Results: Consensus syndrome definitions were generated for the four syndromes monitored by the majority of the 10 participating surveillance systems: Respiratory, gastrointestinal, constitutional, and influenza-like illness (ILI). An important element in coming to consensus quickly was the development of a sensitive and specific definition for respiratory and gastrointestinal syndromes. After the workshop, the definitions were refined and supplemented with keywords and regular expressions, the keywords were mapped to standard vocabularies, and a web ontology language (OWL) ontology was created.

Limitations: The consensus definitions have not yet been validated through implementation.

Conclusion: The consensus definitions provide an explicit description of the current state-of-the-art syndromes used in automated surveillance, which can subsequently be systematically evaluated against real data to improve the definitions. The method for creating consensus definitions could be applied to other domains that have diverse existing definitions.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None.

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