Forum Friday 9/21/18 - Using social media to conduct surveillance 3 E. Lamb The initial hype surrounding social media data did not produce routine, automated integration of social media information in most public health surveillance systems, though there have been occasional reports of value in individual circumstances. Given research findings published in the past couple of years, specifically about the value of social media for local epidemics and other events, we should revisit surveillance possibilities. Last May 24, Mauricio Santillana presented a well-attended webinar on this subject, with recording and slides available at https://www.surveillancerepository.org/digital-epidemiology-designing-machine-learning-approaches-combine-internet-based-data-sources. Among his other recent work, the paper "Accurate Influenza Monitoring and Forecasting Using Novel Internet Data Streams: A Case Study in the Boston Metropolis" is available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5780615/, Takeaway points from Mauricio's Sept. 24 email: 1. The methods to leverage disease-related Google search activity to monitor disease tends in countries, states, and cities have improved, well beyond the early capabilities of the now-discontinued tool Google flu trends, in the past few years. 2. The US CDC has welcomed the use of alternative and Internet-based data sources to track and forecast flu activity in the US, in multiple sitial resolutions. 3. Multiple research teams have shown the added value of using information from electronic health records, Twitter micro-blogs, and participatory disease monitoring apps to complement traditional healthcare-based disease surveillance systems. Other groups also have recently published credible findings that the time for routine use of social media may have come. See the attached papers.
Housing Data Locally 6 D. Bedford We used actual server boxes, no cloud/web-based solutions yet. When we've looked into this in the past, we've encountered both policy issues as well as concern about cost because while the "space" might be affordable, the cost to do a large/frequent transactions in these environments can get expensive.So if you want to use them just as storage space, it may be cost effective, but if you want to actively write/analyze the data, it could be very expensive. That was a few years ago now, so maybe things have changed.
Identifiable Information 0 E. Swartz Good afternoon! Does anybody have access to identifiable syndromic data? Which states and which systems do you use? Thank you!
EMS Data Acquisition and Processing-- Standards 3 J. Johnson Thank you for these responses. I'm sorry I didn't see them sooner-- I think I thought I would get an email notification or something. Amy- I will follow up with you.