PMID: 29769953Sep 3, 2015Paper

Evaluation of a national pharmacy-based syndromic surveillance system

Canada Communicable Disease Report = Relevé Des Maladies Transmissibles Au Canada
P K MuchaalJeff Aramini

Abstract

Traditional public health surveillance provides accurate information but is typically not timely. New early warning systems leveraging timely electronic data are emerging, but the public health value of such systems is still largely unknown. To assess the timeliness and accuracy of pharmacy sales data for both respiratory and gastrointestinal infections and to determine its utility in supporting the surveillance of gastrointestinal illness. To assess timeliness, a prospective and retrospective analysis of data feeds was used to compare the chronological characteristics of each data stream. To assess accuracy, Ontario antiviral prescriptions were compared to confirmed cases of influenza and cases of influenza-like-illness (ILI) from August 2009 to January 2015 and Nova Scotia sales of respiratory over-the-counter products (OTC) were compared to laboratory reports of respiratory pathogen detections from January 2014 to March 2015. Enteric outbreak data (2011-2014) from Nova Scotia were compared to sales of gastrointestinal products for the same time period. To assess utility, pharmacy sales of gastrointestinal products were monitored across Canada to detect unusual increases and reports were disseminated to the provinces and terr...Continue Reading

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