A New Statistical Method to Detect Disease Outbreaks from Hospital Emergency Department Data

Early detection and prediction of disease outbreaks are crucial for public health service delivery, containment response, saving patient lives, and reducing costs. We propose a new data-driven statistical methodology for outbreak detection and prediction based on routinely collected hospital Emergency Department data. The time between consecutive ED presentations matching a diagnosis of interest forms the basis of a novel index measure to signal that an outbreak has occurred. We validate the method using historical presentations of influenza-like illness made to a large sample of public hospital EDs in 2020 and compare outbreaks identified by the method with the start of the first wave of COVID-19. The method shows promise within the field of disease outbreak detection.