Health surveillance

Abstract

This chapter describes the application of statistical methods for health surveillance, including those for health care quality monitoring and those for disease surveillance. The former includes adverse event surveillance as well as the monitoring of non-disease health outcomes, such as rates of caesarean section or hospital readmission rates. The latter includes various types of disease surveillance, including traditional surveillance as well as syndromic surveillance. The methods described are drawn from the industrial quality control and monitoring literature where they are frequently referred to as "control charts." The chapter includes a detailed background of that literature as well as a discussion of the criteria and metrics used to assess the performance of methods of health surveillance methods.