TY - JOUR AU - Wolfe, Mitchell I. AU - Nolte, Kurt B. AU - Yoon, Steven S. T1 - Fatal Infectious Disease Surveillance in a Medical Examiner Database T2 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal PY - 2004 VL - 10 IS - 1 SP - 48 SN - 1080-6059 AB - Increasing infectious disease deaths, the emergence of new infections, and bioterrorism have made surveillance for infectious diseases a public 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 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. KW - medical informatics applications KW - algorithms KW - sentinel surveillance KW - emerging communicable diseases KW - forensic medicine KW - coroners and medical examiners KW - United States DO - 10.3201/eid1001.020764 UR - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/02-0764_article ER - End of Reference