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Nontraumatic Oral Health Classification For Alternative Use Of Syndromic Data, Sherry Burrer, Howard Burkom, Christopher Okunseri, Laurie Barker, Valerie Robison

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

There is increasing demand for ways to use syndromic surveillance data for population health surveillance. The authors developed a nontraumatic oral health classification that could provide timely burden estimates of oral health-related visits to North Carolina (NC) emergency departments (EDs) using BioSense syndromic data. A combination of literature review, input by subject matter experts, and analysis of syndromic data was employed to create a classification that used select chief complaint text and ICD-9-CM codes for visit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Visit estimates created using this classification could contribute to policy decisions aimed at reducing this unnecessary burden on NC EDs.