A Term-based Approach to Asyndromic Determination of Significant Case Clusters

The presented method is a practical, understandable way to monitor single care facilities for chief complaint clusters of concern based on unusually high occurrence of rare or common terms that need not be related to syndromes. Routine implementation requires a human monitor to inspect the relevant CCs make follow-up decisions. Using 7 years of patient records from 15 hospitals, our approach pools CCs into contiguous time blocks and uses a statistical hypothesis test to seek current terms that are anomalous relative to their occurrence in a large sliding baseline. Sets of anomalous terms are then presented for further investigation.