The Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Public Health unit was alerted to an individual with measles in the Emergency Department. To find contacts, Public Health used a manual lookup of hospital records and piloted a time-based automated data query through the syndromic surveillance system, ARTSSN. The completeness and time needed, for both methods were compared. The ARTSSN patient list had 137 contacts compared to 108 from the manual method. Less time was needed for the ARTSSN list. This automated method is valuable in investigating geographic and time-defined Communicable Disease outbreaks as well as potential chemical or radiological exposures.