Modeling emergency department visit patterns for infectious disease complaints: results and application to disease surveillance.

Background: Concern over bio-terrorism has led to recognition that traditional public health surveillance for specific conditions is unlikely to provide timely indication of some disease outbreaks, either naturally occurring or induced by a bioweapon. In non-traditional surveillance, the use of health care resources are monitored in "near real" time for the first signs of an outbreak, such as increases in emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory, gastrointestinal or neurological chief complaints (CC).

Methods: We collected ED CCs from 2/1/94 - 5/31/02 as a training set.