Fatal Infectious Disease Surveillance in a Medical Examiner Database

Fatal Infectious Disease Surveillance in a Medical Examiner Database

Blog Article

Increasing infectious disease deaths, the emergence of new infections, and bioterrorism have made surveillance for infectious diseases a public Cropped health concern.Medical examiners and coroners certify approximately 20% of all deaths that occur within the United States and can be a key source of information regarding infectious disease deaths.We hypothesized that a computer-assisted search tool (algorithm) could detect infectious disease deaths from a medical examiner database, thereby reducing the time and resources required to perform such surveillance manually.

We developed two algorithms, applied them to a medical examiner database, and verified the cases identified against MIRRORS the opinion of a panel of experts.The algorithms detected deaths with infectious components with sensitivities from 67% to 94%, and predictive value positives ranging from 8% to 49%.Algorithms can be useful for surveillance in medical examiner offices that have limited resources or for conducting surveillance across medical examiner jurisdictions.