Electronic medical record (EMR) utilization for public health surveillance.

Introduction: Public health surveillance systems need to be refined. We intend to use a generic approach for early identification of patients with severe influenza-like illness (ILI) by calculating a score that estimates a patients disease-severity. Accordingly, we built the Intelligent Severity Score Estimation Model (ISSEM), structured so that the inference process would reflect experts decision-making logic. Each patients disease-severity score is calculated from numbers of respiratory ICD9 encounters, and laboratory, radiologic, and prescription-therapeutic orders in the EMR. Other ISSEM components include chronic disease evidence, probability of immunodeficiency, and the providers general practice-behavior patterns.

Results: Sensitivity was determined from 200 randomly selected patients with upper- and lower-respiratory tract ILI; specificity, from 300 randomly selected patients with URI only. For different age groups, ISSEM sensitivity ranged between 90% and 95%; specificity was 72% to 84%.

Conclusion: Our preliminary assessment of ISSEM performance demonstrated 93.5% sensitivity and 77.3% specificity across all age groups.