Monitoring and Surveillance of Behavioral Health in the Context of Public Health Emergencies
A Toolkit for Public Health Officials
Abbreviations and Definitions of Key Terms
Abbreviations
| Abbreviation | Definition |
|---|---|
| AAPCC | American Association of Poison Control Centers |
| ARIMA | autoregressive integrated moving average |
| BH | behavioral health |
| BLS | Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| BRFSS | Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System |
| CDC | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention |
| CI | confidence interval |
| COVID-19 | coronavirus disease 2019 |
| CPA | change-point analysis |
| CSTE | Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists |
| CTL | crisis text line |
| CUSUM | cumulative sum |
| DiD | difference-in-differences |
| DOH | Department of Health |
| DOL | Department of Labor |
| ED | emergency department |
| EMS | emergency medical services |
| ESSENCE | Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics |
| EWMA | exponentially weighted moving average |
| ICD-10-CM | International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification |
| ITSA | interrupted time series analysis |
| L.A. | Los Angeles |
| LAUS | Local Area Unemployment Statistics |
| NEMSIS | National Emergency Medical Services Information System |
| NPDS | National Poison Data System |
| NRDM | National Retail Data Monitor |
| NSSP | National Syndromic Surveillance Program |
| OTC | over the counter |
| PCC | Poison Control Center |
| PH | public health |
| PHE | public health emergency |
| PROMIS | Program to Measure Insured Unemployed Statistics |
| PTSD | posttraumatic stress disorder |
| PTSS | posttraumatic stress syndrome |
| RHINO | Rapid Health Information Network |
| SAMHSA | Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration |
| SI | suicidal ideation |
| SSRI | selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor |
| UI | unemployment insurance |
Definitions of Key Terms
- Behavioral health: Encompasses mental health conditions and substance use disorders, as well as psychological well-being. BH includes behaviors related to life stressors, crises, and stress-related physical symptoms and can affect health outcomes. BH issues include mental health conditions, SI or suicide attempts, and substance use disorders (Evans and Bufka, 2020; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2011).
- Public health emergency: Situations in which “health consequences have the potential to overwhelm routine community capabilities to address them” (Nelson et al., 2007, p. S9).
- Disaster: “A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.” A disaster is a type of PHE (International Strategy for Disaster Reduction [ISDR], 2007, p. 9).
- Monitoring: The routine tracking of priority information to detect early warnings of health problems or program performance (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS [UNAIDS], 2000).
- Surveillance: “The systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of death, injury, and illness data, which enables public health to identify adverse health effects in the community” (National Center for Environmental Health, 2016, p. 3; also see Thacker and Berkelman, 1988).
- Disaster surveillance: Assessing “the human health impacts of a disaster and evaluating potential problems related to planning and prevention,” which helps “identify risk factors, track disease trends, determine action items, and target interventions” (CDC, 2019).
- Health equity: “Fair and just access to health resources, protection from health hazards, and health decisionmaking” (Chandra, Martin, and Acosta, 2021; also see RAND Corporation, undated).
