Exposure, Risk Factors, and Underlying Health | Core Data Elements for Case Notification
Public health surveillance routinely collects data on exposures, risk factors, and underlying health conditions (ERU) to understand trends in disease transmission or prevalence. Exposures describe specific settings, events, or activities where a person may have encountered a cause of disease, risk factors describe behavioral, social, or situational aspects of a person’s life, and underlying conditions describe existing medical or health-related conditions.
What might fall into any of these three of these categories may vary across conditions. While not every condition will require transmitted data for all three data classes, establishing standardized definitions for each supports clearer, more consistent categorization across conditions and improves the quality of shared public health data.
Core Surveillance Data Elements in the Death Data Class
For complete definitions, value sets, data structure notes and implementation recommendations, please review the full document drafted by the Data Standardization Working Group (DSWG).