BioCaster in 2021: automatic disease outbreaks detection from global news media.

Summary: BioCaster was launched in 2008 to provide an ontology-based text mining system for early disease detection from open news sources. Following a 6-year break, we have re-launched the system in 2021. Our goal is to systematically upgrade the methodology using state-of-the-art neural network language models, whilst retaining the original benefits that the system provided in terms of logical reasoning and automated early detection of infectious disease outbreaks.

EpiTopics: A dynamic machine learning model to predict and inform non-pharmacological public health interventions from global news reports.

Non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) are important for controlling infectious diseases such as COVID-19, but their implementation is currently monitored in an ad hoc manner. To address this issue, we present a three-stage machine learning framework called EpiTopics to facilitate the surveillance of NPI. In this protocol, we outline the use of transfer-learning to address the limited number of NPI-labeled documents and topic modeling to support interpretation of the results.

Inferring global-scale temporal latent topics from news reports to predict public health interventions for COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) for controlling epidemics of emerging infectious diseases. Despite their importance, NPIs have been monitored mainly through the manual efforts of volunteers. This approach hinders measurement of the NPI effectiveness and development of evidence to guide their use to control the global pandemic.

Monitoring non-pharmaceutical public health interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Measuring and monitoring non-pharmaceutical interventions is important yet challenging due to the need to clearly define and encode non-pharmaceutical interventions, to collect geographically and socially representative data, and to accurately document the timing at which interventions are initiated and changed. These challenges highlight the importance of integrating and triangulating across multiple databases and the need to expand and fund the mandate for public health organizations to track interventions systematically.

Cost-Effectiveness of Housing First With Assertive Community Treatment: Results From the Canadian At Home/Chez Soi Trial.

Objective: The At Home/Chez Soi trial for homeless individuals with mental illness showed scattered-site Housing First with Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) to be more effective than treatment as usual. This study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of Housing First with ACT and treatment as usual.

Methods: Between October 2009 and June 2011, a total of 950 homeless individuals with serious mental illness were recruited in five Canadian cities: Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Moncton.

Modeling Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Progression Using Continuous-Time Hidden Markov Models.

Understanding the progression of chronic diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is important to inform early diagnosis, personalized care, and health system management. Data from clinical and administrative systems have the potential to advance this understanding, but traditional methods for modelling disease progression are not well-suited to analyzing data collected at irregular intervals, such as when a patient interacts with a healthcare system. We applied a continuous-time hidden Markov model to irregularly-spaced healthcare utilization events and patient-level characteristics in order to analyze the progression through discrete states of 76,888 patients with COPD.

Cost-effectiveness of Housing First Intervention With Intensive Case Management Compared With Treatment as Usual for Homeless Adults With Mental Illness: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: In the At Home/Chez Soi trial for homeless individuals with mental illness, the scattered-site Housing First (HF) with Intensive Case Management (ICM) intervention proved more effective than treatment as usual (TAU).

Objective: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the HF plus ICM intervention compared with TAU.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This is an economic evaluation study of data from the At Home/Chez Soi randomized clinical trial.

Initial Usability Evaluation of a Knowledge-Based Population Health Information System: The Population Health Record (PopHR).

We report the baseline usability of a novel web-based application, the Population Health Record (PopHR), designed to facilitate the effective use of population health information by public health professionals and to support evidence-based decision-making. The usability test was conducted with ten potential users who each completed eight tasks using the PopHR system. Participant responses were recorded, including timestamps for each data entry.

Hospital readmissions and the day of the week.

Objectives Patients discharged from hospitals on a Friday (Friday discharges) are readmitted sooner (a shorter time-to-emergency-readmission) than those discharged on any other day of the week. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of increasing weekend capacity, the effect estimate of Friday discharge on time-to-emergency-readmission needs to be precise. However, precise effect estimation is complicated by the confounding effect of differing healthcare-seeking behaviour and admission practices, and therefore different admission probability, by day of the week.

Epidemiology of recurrent traumatic brain injury in the general population: A systematic review.

Objective: To comprehensively assess recurrent traumatic brain injury (rTBI) risk and risk factors in the general population.

Methods: We systematically searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the references of included studies until January 16, 2017, for general population observational studies reporting rTBI risk or risk factors. Estimates were not meta-analyzed due to significant methodologic heterogeneity between studies, which was evaluated using meta-regression.

Costs of services for homeless people with mental illness in 5 Canadian cities: a large prospective follow-up study.

Background: Limited evidence on the costs of homelessness in Canada is available. We estimated the average annual costs, in total and by cost category, that homeless people with mental illness engender from the perspective of society. We also identified individual characteristics associated with higher costs.

Multivariate and Longitudinal Health System Indicators.

Within population health information systems, indicators are commonly presented as independent, cross-sectional measures, neglecting the multivariate, longitudinal nature of disease progression, health care use, and profiles of performance. We use administrative claims data of Montreal, Canada to identify patterns across indicators and over time in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients. We first cluster regions based on four health service indicators.

Changes in quality of life from a homelessness intervention: true change, response shift, or random variation.

Background And Objective: Participants experiencing homelessness and mental illness who received housing and support through the At Home/Chez Soi trial showed modest gains in quality of life (QOL) compared to treatment as usual participants. Participants' QOL ratings over time may have been affected by either response shift triggered by new life circumstances or by random variation in the meaning of QOL ratings. This study seeks to identify both phenomena to estimate the intervention's effect on true change in QOL.

Media content about vaccines in the United States and Canada, 2012-2014: An analysis using data from the Vaccine Sentimeter.

Background: A system for monitoring vaccine-related media content was previously developed and studied from an international perspective. This monitoring approach could also have value at a regional level, but it has yet to be evaluated at this scale. We examined regional patterns of vaccine-related media topics and sentiment in the US and Canada.