EpiCenter's syndromic surveillance functionality is a great starting point for a community health surveillance project.  Syndromic surveillance provides an early, general view into the health of a community, and can be used as a solid base on which to build a comprehensive surveillance and reporting system.

Syndromic surveillance is also the first logical step in connecting healthcare to a public health system.  It uses emergency department registration data that is easily accessed and straightforward to standardize.  Extracting the data imposes a lightweight burden on participating facilities.  In most cases, the demand on a healthcare facility's I.T. staff is less than 10 hours to start with and almost non-existent thereafter.  Since it ties into a healthcare facility's existing workflow, it simply runs in the background and does not require any manual data entry.

With EpiCenter, public health acquires an up-to-the moment view of general community health in its region.  Among other features, establishing syndromic surveillance with EpiCenter provides:

• Notification of highly unusual disease complaints in a region
• Insight into cyclical trends of disease complaints
• Historic baseline for assessment of recent events

With the EpiCenter system in place, public health receives support for other more common daily tasks.  Using the animal-related injury classifier, public health can track all too often under-reported animal bites.  Similarly, the traumatic injury classifier provides insight into diverse events such as motor vehicle accidents, assault, and drug-related admissions.