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Atrubin David

Description

On September 10, 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida. Over 90% of Florida counties reported power outages as of September 11. During power outages, CO poisonings often occur due to indoor use of fuel combustion sources (e.g., cooking, heating) or generators for electricity. CO poisoning is a reportable condition in Florida; health care providers and laboratories are required to report suspected cases to the Florida Department of Health (FDOH). In Florida, approximately 202 cases of CO poisoning are reported each year (three-year average from 2014 to 2016). In addition to passive surveillance, FDOH uses the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL) to find cases of CO poisoning. ESSENCE-FL provides access to ED data from 98% (255 out of 260) of EDs in Florida and all statewide FPICN call data (includes three poison control centers). ESSENCE-FL provides near real-time access to these data sets, as ED data are uploaded every 2 hours or once a day (depending on the hospital system) and FPICN data are uploaded every 10 minutes. The statewide FPICN database includes information about substance, signs and symptoms, exposure scenario, and patient identification information provided by the individual caller or clinician from a health care facility.

Objective: This study describes how Florida Poison Information Center Network (FPICN) and emergency department (ED) data accessed through Florida's syndromic surveillance system were used to conduct near real-time carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning surveillance and active case finding in response to Hurricane Irma in Florida..

Submitted by elamb on
Description

On September 10, 2017, Irma made landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 hurricane and subsequently tracked up the west side of the state. Due to the size of the storm, it impacted nearly all of Florida. The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL), the state’s syndromic surveillance system, captures 98% of the emergency department (ED) visits statewide and has historically served a vital function in providing near real-time ED data that are used to track post-disaster morbidity and mortality. After previous hurricanes and tropical storms, increases in carbon monoxide poisonings, animal bites, and injuries have been documented. During post-Irma surveillance, an additional increase in seizure-related ED visits was observed.

Objective: Using Florida's syndromic surveillance data, to describe the increase in seizure activity in the days after Hurricane Irma made landfall in 2017

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Syndromic surveillance has become an integral component of public health surveillance efforts within the state of Florida. The near real-time nature of these data are critical during events such as the Zika virus outbreak in Florida in 2016 and in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in 2017. Additionally, syndromic surveillance data are utilized to support daily reportable disease detection and other surveillance efforts. Although syndromic systems typically utilize emergency department (ED) visit data, ESSENCE-FL also includes data from non-traditional sources: urgent care center visit data, mortality data, reportable disease data, and Florida Poison Information Center Network (FPICN) data. Inclusion of these data sources within the same system enables the broad accessibility of the data to more than 400 users statewide, and allows for rapid visualization of multiple data sources in order to address public health needs. Currently, the ESSENCE-FL team is actively working to incorporate EMS data into ESSENCE-FL to further increase public health surveillance capacity and data visualization.

Objective: To describe the strategy and process used by the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) Bureau of Epidemiology to onboard emergency medical services (EMS) data into FDOH’s syndromic surveillance system, the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL).

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Collaborative relationships between academicians and public health practitioners are necessary to ensure that methodologies created in the research setting translate into practice. One barrier to forging these collaborations is restrictions on the sharing and availability of public health surveillance data; therefore, most academics with expertise in method development cannot access 'real world' surveillance data with which to evaluate their approaches. The ISDS Technical Conventions Committee was established in 2013 to facilitate and expedite the development, evaluation, and implementation of technical methods for public health surveillance. The purpose of the committee is to bridge a long-standing gap between technical challenges in public health practice and solution developers needing both understanding of these challenges and representative data.

Objective

The purpose of this panel is to facilitate the dissemination of surveillance-related use cases by public health practitioners with accompanying benchmark datasets to method developers. The panel will present practitioners' experiences with preparing patient-level emergency department data sets to accompany a use case submitted to the ISDS Technical Conventions Committee.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

Zika virus disease became a significant public health problem in Brazil in 2015 and quickly spread to other South American and Central American countries. While not an overly severe illness for many, Zika virus disease has been shown to increase the probability of severe birth defects in babies when their mothers are infected with the virus during pregnancy. Zika virus disease has also been associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Submitted by elamb on

This syndrome was designed to capture rabies PEP visits and animal bites (excluding insect, human, snake, arachnid, and fish bites).

The query is designed using ESSENCE syntax (from the query portal)

The query is designed to be run against emergency department and urgent care center data by querying the chief complaint-discharge diagnosis (CCDD) field.

The query does not include ICD-10 or SNOMED codes (we receive textual descriptions of all discharge diagnoses), but the codes could certainly be added.

 

Submitted by Anonymous on
Description

The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics in Florida (ESSENCE-FL) is a web-based application for use by public health professionals within the Florida Department of Health (FDOH). The main source of data for ESSENCE-FL is emergency department (ED) data. Ten hospitals in Hillsborough County, Florida send their data to the ESSENCE-FL server. ESSENCE-FL requires only a limited data set to be sent by the hospital which includes patient chief complaint (CC) and discharge diagnosis (DD). These fields can be searched individually, in separate queries, to identify possible records of interest. These two fields have been concatenated to create the single chief complaint and discharge diagnosis (CCDD) field, allowing both fields to be searched with a single query.

Objective

While syndromic surveillance systems were originally designed for the detection of outbreaks and clusters of illness, they have been found to be useful at identifying unreported conditions of public health importance. Within the Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County (FDOH-Hillsborough), these conditions of public health importance have primarily focused on the reportable diseases and conditions that fall under the responsibility of the Epidemiology Program and have not included tuberculosis. A specific query has been developed to search for and identify possible tuberculosis patients and exposed contacts. This study is designed to determine the usefulness of specific-term chief complaint and discharge diagnosis (CCDD) queries in identifying tuberculosis patients and exposed contacts.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

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.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

Objective:

To describe disease and illness surveillance utilized during the 2012 Republican National Convention (RNC) held August 26-30, 2012 in Tampa, FL.

Introduction:

While the Tampa Bay Area has previously hosted other high profile events that required heightened disease surveillance (e.g., two Super Bowls), the 2012 RNC marked the first national special security event (NSSE) held in Florida. The Hillsborough County Health Department (HCHD), in conjunction with the Pinellas County Health Department (PinCHD) coordinated disease surveillance activities during this time frame. This presentation will focus of the disease surveillance efforts of the Hillsborough County Health Department during the 2012 RNC. In addition to the surveillance systems that are used routinely, the HCHD Epidemiology Program implemented additional systems designed to rapidly detect individual cases and outbreaks of public health importance. The short duration of RNC, coupled with the large number of visitors to our area, provided additional surveillance challenges. Tropical Storm Isaac, which threatened Tampa in the days leading up to RNC, and an overwhelming law enforcement presence likely dissuaded many protestors from coming to Tampa. As a result, a tiny fraction of the number of protestors that were expected actually showed up.

Submitted by jababrad@indiana.edu on
Description

With increasing awareness of SyS systems, there has been a concurrent increase in demand for data from these systems – both from researchers and from the media. The opioid epidemic occurring in the United States has forced the SyS community to determine the best way to present these data in a way that makes sense while acknowledging the incompleteness and variability in how the data are collected at the hospital level and queried at the user level. While significant time and effort are spent discussing optimal queries, responsible presentation of the data - including data disclaimers - is rarely discussed within the SyS community.

Objective:

To discuss data disclaimers and caveats that are fundamental to sharing syndromic surveillance (SyS) data

Submitted by elamb on