The Florida Department of
Health (FDOH) operates and manages the Florida Birth Defects Registry (FBDR) (http://www.fbdr.org/). It is one of the largest, population-based birth
defects surveillance systems in the United States, identifying birth defects in
Florida since 1998. The FBDR relies on passive case ascertainment, in which
multiple administrative datasets, such as hospital discharge data or service
related databases, are linked and scanned for diagnoses indicative of birth
defects.
Since 2004, the FDOH has
partnered with the Birth Defects Surveillance Program (BDSP) on several
enhanced surveillance of birth defects projects. The main purpose of these
projects are to confirm suspected cases of selected birth defects that have
been identified by diagnosis codes in administrative datasets and collect
detailed clinical information in order to enhance the quality of birth defects
surveillance data in Florida. More recently, due to the link between Zika virus
and serious birth defects, the FDOH and BDSP have expanded the list of birth
defects being confirmed to include microcephaly and other conditions of the
brain and central nervous system in order to carefully monitor their prevalence.
Lastly, the BDSP also conducts enhanced surveillance of Neonatal Abstinence
Syndrome, a postnatal drug withdrawal syndrome that occurs primarily among
opioid-exposed infants.