Governance: current trends in board education, competencies, and qualifications.

Hospitals and health system boards have been under enormous pressure to be more accountable. However, there is now an emerging trend of voluntary, mandatory, and payer-driven board education programs. Currently, 13 states have some type of formal, organized board education and development initiative, 10 of which are classified as "director and/ or board certificate" or "certification" programs; the American Hospital Association (through and with its affiliated Center for Healthcare Governance) has issued a Blue Ribbon Panel Report on core competencies.

Recombinant temporal aberration detection algorithms for enhanced biosurveillance.

Objective: Broadly, this research aims to improve the outbreak detection performance and, therefore, the cost effectiveness of automated syndromic surveillance systems by building novel, recombinant temporal aberration detection algorithms from components of previously developed detectors.

Methods: This study decomposes existing temporal aberration detection algorithms into two sequential stages and investigates the individual impact of each stage on outbreak detection performance. The data forecasting stage (Stage 1) generates predictions of time series values a certain number of time steps in the future based on historical data.

Automated time series forecasting for biosurveillance.

For robust detection performance, traditional control chart monitoring for biosurveillance is based on input data free of trends, day-of-week effects, and other systematic behaviour. Time series forecasting methods may be used to remove this behaviour by subtracting forecasts from observations to form residuals for algorithmic input. We describe three forecast methods and compare their predictive accuracy on each of 16 authentic syndromic data streams.