The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) electronically receives both urgent care center (UCC) data and hospital emergency department (ED) data from health care facilities in 43 of its 67 counties through its Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL). Each submitted record is assigned to one of eleven ESSENCE Syndrome categories based on parsing of chief complaint data. The UCC data come from 22 urgent care centers located in Central Florida, and the ED data come from 161 hospitals located across the state. Traditionally, the data from these two sources are grouped and viewed together. To date, limited investigation has been carried out on the validity of grouping data from UCCS and EDs in ESSENCE-FL. This project will investigate and describe the differences between the data received from these two sources and provide best practices for grouping and analyzing these data sources.
Objective
To identify best practices for grouping emergency department and urgent care data in a syndromic surveillance system.