Evaluations of methods for statistical surveillance

The needs for statistical surveillance in different areas of medicine are described. The predictive value of an alarm and other measures for the evaluation of alarm procedures are suggested. The measures are used to evaluate some common methods of continual surveillance of time series. It is demonstrated that some methods have about the same properties at the start of the surveillance period as later. This is however not the case for all methods. For some methods the consequence of an early alarm should be quite different from that of a late one.