Integration of New Emergency Services into the Oscour® Network in Midi-Pyrénées

The Oscour® Midi-Pyrénées network (Organization for Coordinated Emergency Monitoring) now includes 33 emergency departments following the addition of 11 departments in Week 5, with historical data dating back to early 2014. This represents the largest expansion of the network in Midi-Pyrénées since its creation in 2004 (in terms of the number of facilities). The integration of these facilities was made possible by the work carried out by the Midi-Pyrénées Regional Emergency Observatory (Orumip) in partnership with the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance (InVS). Among the new participants are the hospitals (CH) in Rodez, Saint-Affrique, and Villefranche-de-Rouergue in Aveyron, the Ambroise Paré clinics (Toulouse), Saint-Jean-Languedoc (Toulouse), and Les Cèdres (Cornebarrieu) in Haute-Garonne; the Condom Hospital in the Gers; the Figeac and Saint-Céré Hospitals in the Lot; the Ormeau Clinic (Tarbes) in the Hautes-Pyrénées; and the Pont-de-Chaume Clinic (Montauban) in Tarn-et-Garonne. The inclusion of these new facilities improves the network’s geographic coverage and increases the completeness of the data available for surveillance and alert purposes. Thus, regarding the monitoring of activity indicators (total number of visits by monitored age group), 96.9% of administrative visit data were available via the Oscour® network in week 5, compared to approximately 76.5% in week 4. Regarding syndromic surveillance, 65.8% of visits in the region had a coded diagnosis in Week 5 (25 emergency departments transmitting medical data) compared to 64.1% in Week 4 (20 emergency departments). Although this improvement is significant in terms of the completeness of usable visit data, it now enables the production of surveillance indicators (particularly during this period of winter epidemic surveillance) in the Gers department and allows for a more refined interpretation of the analyzed data for the departments of Aveyron, Haute-Garonne, Lot, and Hautes-Pyrénées.Efforts must now focus, on the one hand, on improving coding practices for medical visit data and, on the other hand, on including the four remaining off-network facilities in Midi-Pyrénées (Lavalanet Hospital in Ariège, Decazeville Hospital in Aveyron, and the Union and Occitanie clinics in Haute-Garonne).