Spatio-Temporal Disease Surveillance

Leveraging electronic medical records for passive disease surveillance in a COVID-19 care facility

“…With the knowledge that communicable diseases were likely to cluster in space, adding spatial information to traditional time-based methods would provide additional power and efficacy in detecting outbreaks. [ 4 ] A recent review found that a third of public health surveillance algorithms made use of spatial information. [ 5 ] We thus designed the system to generate two outputs: a control chart to identify time-based aberrations and a geospatial map of cases to highlight any physical clustering of cases.…”