CONCLUSIONS: Notifiable disease data may suffer from selection bias; administrative health data may be insufficiently precise without laboratory confirmation. Our results illustrate differences in the spatial and temporal information generated from these two systems of case identification. Future surveillance of gastrointestinal illness of infectious origin may benefit from case ascertainment algorithms based on both sources of data.
PMID: 19195926 [PubMed – as supplied by publisher] (Source: International Journal of Medical Informatics).