Nontraumatic Oral Health Classification for Alternative Use of Syndromic Data

Abstract

There is increasing demand for ways to use syndromic surveillance data for population health surveillance. The authors developed a nontraumatic oral health classification that could provide timely burden estimates of oral health-related visits to North Carolina (NC) emergency departments (EDs) using BioSense syndromic data. A combination of literature review, input by subject matter experts, and analysis of syndromic data was employed to create a classification that used select chief complaint text and ICD-9-CM codes for visit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Visit estimates created using this classification could contribute to policy decisions aimed at reducing this unnecessary burden on NC EDs.