Epidemiologic data are paramount to targeting and implementing evidence-based control measures to protect the public’s health and safety. Nowhere are data more important than during a field epidemiologic investigation to identify the cause of an urgent public health problem that requires immediate intervention. Many of the steps to conducting a field investigation rely on identifying relevant existing data or collecting new data that address the key investigation objectives. In today’s information age, the challenge is not the lack of data but rather how to identify the most relevant data for meaningful results and how to combine data from various sources that might not be standardized or interoperable to enable analysis. Epidemiologists need to determine quickly whether existing data can be analyzed to inform the investigation or whether additional data need to be collected and how to do so most efficiently and expeditiously.
Epidemiologists working in applied public health have myriad potential data sources available to them. Multiple factors must be considered when identifying relevant data sources for conducting a field investigation. These include investigation objectives and scope, whether requisite data exist and can be accessed, to what extent data from different sources can be practically combined, methods for and feasibility of primary data collection, and resources (e.g., staff, funding) available. Sources of data and approaches to data collection vary by topic. Although public health departments have access to notifiable disease case data (primarily for communicable diseases) through mandatory reporting by providers and laboratories, data on chronic diseases and injuries might be available only through secondary sources, such as hospital discharge summaries. Existing data on health risk behaviors might be available from population-based surveys, but these surveys generally are conducted only among a small proportion of the total population and are de-identified. Although some existing data sources (e.g., death certificates) cover many disease outcomes, others are more specific (e.g., reportable disease registries).
Accessing or collecting clean, valid, reliable, and timely data challenges most field epidemiologic investigations. New data collected in the context of field investigations should be evaluated for attributes similar to those for surveillance data, such as quality, definitions, timeliness, completeness, simplicity, generalizability, validity, and reliability. Epidemiologists would do well to remember GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) when delineating their data collection plans.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018, December 13). Describing epidemiologic data. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/chapters/Describing-Epi-Data.html
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