| Background. Surveillance is an important component of health care. Current techniques are coarse grain, operate at large geographic scale, and slow therefore they are less useful to acute care workers. Objective. to develop and pilot a new surveillance model, using patient entered data and automated data techniques. Methods. Data collection was by web survey. Health care worker interface was facilitated by automated data collation and visualization. A pilot in a pediatric emergency setting and a subsequent user study of the visualization tool was performed. Results. The pilot demonstrated proof of concept and useful locally relevant data was obtained. The user study showed that the visualization tool communicated trends well, and was judged to be valuable by domain experts. Conclusions. Patient entered data can he used, in conjunction with automated data collection and visualization techniques, to provide useful surveillance information in the local, acute care context. |
