The Medical Surveillance Monthly Report: The Evolution of a Public Health and Preventive Medicine Based Publication Providing Information On the Health of U.S. Military Members and Military Associated Populations

Background:  Before 1995, there was no regular, widely-disseminated report describing morbidity and mortality across the Department of Defense (DoD). The Medical Surveillance Monthly Report (MSMR) was created as a military version of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). 

Program background:  The MSMR has been in continuous publication since 1995 and is the publication of record of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center. It’s mission has been to provide unbiased, scientifically rigorous evidence based estimates of the incidence, distribution, impact and trends of illness and injury among United States military members and associated populations and to describe the natures and magnitudes of threats to the health, safety, physical and mental fitness of U.S. military members and associated populations. It was indexed in Medline beginning in 2011 and all copies are available online at http://www.afhsc.mil/msmr. A focus of the MSMR has been to draw attention to conditions that are “high burden” for the military and have concomitant impact on the health of the force; a secondary goal has been to be a source of unbiased health information for public health professionals throughout the U.S. Military Health System, civilian members of boards, commissions, and panels that advise leaders, policymakers, and other professionals in the U.S. Military Health System, and the scientific and lay press.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  We evaluated the MSMR’s impact and “penetrance’ by several metrics since 1995: 1) The number of MSMR articles published each year; 2) The number and location of subscribers; 3) The number of “hits” to an issue of the MSMR on the AFHSC website in the first month of its publication online; 4) The number of hits to specific issues of the MSMR each month from PubMed; 5) The number of submissions to the MSMR from authors outside the AFHSC; 6) The number of times the MSMR has been the source of data on military health in lay press and media; 8) The number of times that MSMR analyses have been cited in scientific reports and publications on military health).  All metrics assessed demonstrated positive trends over time. The number of articles has increased each year to a high of 65 articles in 2012. The proportion of articles contributed by outside authors has more than doubled (from ~4% to 10% in 2012). Additional statistics on MSMR articles that have been covered extensively by lay press and cited in outside reports will be presented.

Conclusions:  Commitment to stated goals and objectives have propelled the MSMR to be one of the most widely read and consulted publications on issues affecting military health and readiness and has served as an avenue to focus attention on military health issues based on data driven analyses.

Implications for research and/or practice: N/A