❤️ "RE: UR SyS work, please tell me about_______."

It was really nice to meet all of you! In response to Gabe's question, I did my grad school practicum at a health department and did a project using syndromic surveillance data! When I got hired as the state syndromic epi I was excited since I was already familiar with the database and using queries.

Nice to meet everyone - hopefully next time it is in person! Charlie, thanks for sharing notes from our conversation. What platform did you use to capture everything?

With regards to education - I wonder if there is an opportunity to add more about syndromic surveillance to public health curricula - especially for those who plan to possibly pursue a career in state/local government. When I did my MPH in Epi at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, we had just one lecture on all different types of surveillance. Maybe there is a way to connect with LHDs/state government and do a deeper dive into syndromic surveillance.

Another thought/question I have about syndromic surveillance is educating partners. How have you all explained what syndromic surveillance is to outside partners who might use your data, but who are not necessarily familiar with the practice?

…the app is Mindnode. It's available on MacOS and iPadOS platforms only.

Can also say it was great to meet everyone and to have our discussion! Very exciting and hope to see everyone again in the future.

To continue the SyS in education dialogue, I experienced a similar situation as some others during my MPH at Tulane's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (grad 2019). Syndromic surveillance was mentioned in passing but never enough to emphasize how much the field really contains. With regards to curricula, maybe there will be (and maybe already has been?) a push to include more information about SyS and its programs because of COVID-19. It is hard for me to imagine any public health class today that would not take the chance to incorporate COVID in some way as a real-time example of public health in action since March 2020, potentially from the SyS point of view. 

Also, I wanted to say thank you to all that gave their insight on effective data visualization methods in this field. My previous experience as a data analyst has been more from the neuroscience/clinical trials standpoint, and while I did leverage data from studies regarding environmental exposures and CNS outcomes, the overall trends in presenting data for that field are somewhat different as compared to SyS! (Although there are some overlaps in the heatmap department.) 

And I think it would be great for MPH program to teach more about SyS but also more about practical data sources utilized in health departments in general.

To the question about educating outside public health! I actually just gave a presentation touching a a little bit on this in the breakout Syndromic What? Sharing Data Outside Public Health if you get a chance to view recordings when they are released. I'm very passionate about this subject in particular. I've had several docs come shadow me and they are always blown away we can see this information. I think ED clinicians should be aware we are monitoring their documentation for public health! There is actually a great study (Improving Collaboration Between Public Health and Medicine: A Timely Survey of Clinician Public Health Knowledge, Training, and Engagement - PubMed (nih.gov)) highlighting some challenges here!

I'm very interested to here more about the question on barriers? Is this barriers towards being able to define what syndromic is best used for/best practices, or how to get others to understand the value of syndromic surveillance. I know I always struggle to get people to get past the fact that the data isn't clean, but even clean data isn't necessarily accurate and syndromic has some huge advantages. Numbers don't have to be exact to guide public health action and situational awareness is SO important! Knowing it's limitations actually really allows us to ask more specific questions. I think it is a little challenging that things are expanding so rapidly from a guidance standpoint. Coverage and level or timing of involvement varies so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, even variables captured and platforms used so that makes it challenging too. My dream for public health is that one day our data systems won't be outdated and will talk to each other more easily, but it seems like a big ask.