Clark Charles

Illnesses related to synthetic marijuana use have been reported in many states, including Florida. Because these visits can present with a variety of symptoms, as well as be attributed to numerous diagnosis codes, it can be difficult to identify and quantify these visits. The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics in Florida (ESSENCE-FL) receives chief complaint (CC) and discharge diagnosis (DD) data as free text allowing uncommon or new terms to be searched for within each patient visit. The main source of data for ESSENCE-FL is emergency department (ED) and urgent care center (UCC) data. There are currently 210 EDs and 33 UCCs throughout Florida that send their data to the ESSENCE-FL server. Using ESSENCE-FL, a free text query of patient CCs and DDs was used to identify visits related to synthetic marijuana use. This study is designed to analyze these identified visits for trends over time, geographical distribution and descriptive statistics and demographics.

Objective

One of the numerous functions of syndromic data has been the identification of visits of public health interest using customized free text queries. A specific query of syndromic data was created to search for and identify emergency department (ED) and urgent care center (UCC) visits possibly related to the use of synthetic marijuana to describe and quantify this public health issue in Florida.

The Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County (FDOH- Hillsborough) conducts enhanced syndromic surveillance on a daily basis. The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics in Florida (ESSENCE-FL) is the syndromic surveillance system used by epidemiologists within the Florida Department of Health (FDOH). During the time of this study, ESSENCE-FL receives data from 210 of emergency departments (ED) and 33 urgent care centers (UCC) throughout the state of Florida, including 12 EDs and 3 UCCs in Hillsborough County. In 2014, the ESSENCE-FL system added a feature that delivers an automatic daily email to designated primary ESSENCE-FL users in each county containing all visits which have been detected by the state’s visits of interest (VOI) query. The email contains all visits which have been detected by the visits of interest (VOI) query for each ESSENCE-FL users designated county. The VOI query utilizes the combined chief complaint and discharge diagnosis (CCDD) field of a visit for keywords related to reportable diseases and exposures of public health interest. In addition to this VOI email, Hillsborough County analyzes time of arrival alerts, specialized emerging infectious disease queries, poison information center data, and volume levels of syndromes and subsyndromes predetermined by ESSENCE-FL. A daily summary report of the enhanced daily surveillance analysis is then provided to area public health officials within FDOH-Hillsborough and the surrounding counties. This study examines how visits requiring additional investigation are detected and the resources required to complete the investigation.

Objective

Enhanced daily surveillance is used to identify reportable diseases, outbreaks, and clusters and provides situational awareness. This project examines how health care visits requiring additional information are detected using enhanced syndromic surveillance and the resources required from detection through completion.