Surveillance and Descriptive Epidemiology

National Center for Health Statistics

Death Information

This is still under the first step of solving health problems; to identify or define the problem.

The data source with information taken from death records comes from the National Vital Statistics Reports (NVSS), which is published by the CDC (National Center for Health Statistics NCHS), which collects from NVSS.

To optain vital statistics data:

• CDC offers a public interface called CDC Wonder that allows you to query the US mortality database to obtain data on deaths by cuase, location, demographic, characteristics, and time period.
• States also publish reports on mortality. Data is taken from the same death certificates.

By looking into the breakdowns of data, we can go from identifying "opioid related deaths in Maryalnd" as a public health problem to defining "fentanyl-related deaths in the Baltimroe Metro area" as the problem we want to address right away.

• This is an example on how we use data from decision making.

Surveys

NCHS also collects information about non-fatal healht outcomes and other useful measures. It maintains severeal different public health data systems that provides this kind of information.

• They maintain data they collect from population surveys, the two most important surveys being the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and National Helath and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANEs).

prevalence is the proportion of peresons in a population who are living with the disease, injury, or risk factor of interest at a specific point of time.

• prevalence counts all ongoing "cases" in the population at that time., regardless of when a person aquired the disease, injury, or risk factor.

Fin dthis infomration on the CHS web site.

We use data from these surveys to identify health problems because they are surveillance systems. NHIS and NHANES both fall under this definition.

• surveillance is the routine, systematic collection and analysis of data.
  • routine: data must be collected regular or else we won't be able to detect changes in the populations helath when they occur, which is important for addressing problems in a timely matter.
  • systematic: collect data in the same way every time, so that changes we observe can't reflect changes in how we measure health. Collect data the same way from everyone.
  • collection: we must capture all the important pieces of data.
  • analysis: after collection, look and interpret it. We must understand what we are looking at and interpret it correctly.
  • data: information
• We use surveillance data to detect differences between population sub-groups, detect changes in population health status over time,

descriptive epidemiology is the analytical process of describing the health of a population by

• using surveilance data to measure health
• looking at changes over time
• looking at differences between population sub-groups, and looking at differences across geographic regions

Surveillance & Descriptive Epidemiology is one of the most essential tools for step 1 of the public health approach. They include tools that help us identify public health problems and priotizes them.

Epidemiology

epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events in specified populations and the application of this study to control health problems.

• distribution: refers to the patterns we observe in health conditions accross the population. ( which sub-groups experience that health condition the most )
• determinants: refer to the causes of a health condition or things that increase one's risk ("risk factors") for a health condition.
• "health-related states or events": reflects a wide variety of health-related outcomes we study in public health, including all types of diseases and injuries, undiagnosed helath conditions, encounters with health system, etc.
• "specified populations": you define the population of interest. is it the entirity of the US, old people, racial minorities, pregnant women, etc.
• "application of this study to control health problems": the purpose is to prevent public health problems and achieving our public health goals of maximizing the health of the population and eliminating health disparities.

Epidemiology is the core of public health world. It guides the approaches we take and provides analytical methods. It shapes the data we collect, how we collect, how we make a sense of it, how we present, how we act, how we evaluate/