Table 5.

Summary of recommendations for future studies evaluating completeness of surveillance by linking public health surveillance data with a reference standard

1. Report on the context, operations, and system components of the public health surveillance system being evaluated, including the level of integration with other systems.
2. Provide the surveillance case definition (if available), and describe how cases were diagnosed in the reference standard. If possible, apply the surveillance case definition to the reference standard to avoid misclassification in ascertaining cases.
3. Validate the diagnosis of cases in the reference standard if possible, particularly if using inpatient hospital discharges or electronic medical records as reference standards.
4. Describe methods used to match or link records in the diagnostic and public health datasets, such as deterministic or probabilistic linkage, and the accuracy of the match.