Novel approach, using end-of-life issues, for identifying items for public health surveillance

Using end-of-life (EOL) issues to provide context, we introduce a novel approach to identify potential items for public health surveillance. Our method involved an environmental scan of existing EOL surveys and included the following steps: 1) consulting experts for advice on critical EOL topics, 2) identifying a broad sample of EOL surveys, and 3) using an abstraction tool to characterize surveys and survey items. We identified 36 EOL surveys; of these, 10 were state-based surveys. Of the 1,495 EOL items (range, 4 to 126 items per survey), 333 items could be classified in 1 of 11 topic areas of interest. Information on the surveys and these 333 items was entered into a database. As a result of this process, we identified topics for which many EOL items already exist and topics for which items should be developed. We describe the value of this approach and potential next steps for our project.