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Coletta Michael

In 2017, the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) continued to expand as a national scope data source with over 6,500 facilities registered on the BioSense Platform, including 4,000 active, 1,800 onboarding, and 700 planned or inactive facilities. 2,086 of the active facilities are Emergency Departments across 49 sites in 41 states. The growth of data available in NSSP has been driven by continued enhancements to tools and processes used by the NSSP Onboarding Team. These enhancements help to rapidly integrate new healthcare facilities and onboard new public health sites in support of American Hospital Association (AHA) Emergency Department (ED) representativeness goals. Furthermore, with these improvements to the onboarding process, including the Master Facility Table update process and automated data validation reporting, NSSP has broadened stakeholder participation in the onboarding process.

Objective:

This session will present the impacts of enhancements made to National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) BioSense Platform Onboarding in 2017 from the perspective of CDC and public health jurisdictions.

Submitted by elamb on

One of the more recent successes of NSSP has been the introduction of more robust data quality monitoring and reporting. However, despite the increased insight into data quality, there are still concerns about data sharing and comparisons across sites. For NSSP to be most effective, users need to feel confident in sharing data and making comparisons across sites.

Objective:

As the BioSense Platform matures and more sites submit surveillance data, many in the community have voiced concerns about comparing data across sites. Recently, a number of jurisdictions from across the country were asked to provide opioid overdose data to a news agency highlighting the epidemic. Many jurisdictions requested information on how to present syndromic surveillance data from across sites and shared concern about how the data would be interpreted. This round table will address those concerns and explore options for comparing data across sites.

Submitted by elamb on

One of the early successes for the National Syndromic Surveillance Program'™s (NSSP'™s) BioSense Platform was community agreement on what should make up national and regional picture of the data. For NSSP to meet program objectives, National level surveillance and situational awareness had to be made available – not just to CDC, but to the entire community. To make this possible, the community had to agree on a limited dataset that would be sufficient to produce national and regional picture. Currently when NSSP staff at CDC or a particular program review HHS Regional data, they can only see trends at high levels. Although, this information is proving useful, when very unusual data spikes occur there is insufficient information to determine its public health significance. CDC would like to set up HHS Regional Epi groups made up of syndromic surveillance practitioners within regions in order to communicate about potentially unusual findings and discuss implications for local jurisdictions.

Objective:

Within the BioSense Platform, users have the ability to view HHS Region level data that can provide insight into what may be happening around the country. Epidemiologists can examine this information for changes in trends of subsyndromes or other potential issues of public health concern and compare it to their local data. However, the insight that regional data can provide is limited without better understanding of what is happening in the jurisdictions that make up the region. This round table will discuss the benefits of engaging with other jurisdictions within regions and attempt to define rules of engagement that can be used to facilitate interactions.

Submitted by elamb on

The May arrival of two cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the US offered CDC’s BioSense SyS Program an opportunity to give CDC’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and state-and-local jurisdictions an enhanced national picture of MERS surveillance. BioSense jurisdictions can directly query raw data stored in what is known as “the locker.” However, CDC cannot access these data and critical functions, like creating ad-hoc syndrome definitions within the application are currently not possible. These were obstacles to providing the EOC with MERS information. BioSense staff developed a plan to 1) rapidly generate query definitions regardless of the locally preferred SyS tool and, 2) generate aggregate reports to support the national MERS response.

Objective

Demonstrate that information from disparate syndromic surveillance (SyS) systems can be acquired and combined to contribute to national-level situational awareness of emergent threats.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) BioSense system receives near real-time health care utilization data from number of sources, including DoD and VA outpatient facilities, and nonfederal hospital EDs in the US to support all-hazards surveillance and situational awareness. However, the BioSense system lacks some critical functions such as creating ad hoc definition of syndrome or ad hoc query tool development. This limits CDC Emergency Operations Center’s (EOC) ability to monitor new health events such as MERS - a viral respiratory illness first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In May 2014, CDC confirmed two unlinked imported cases of MERS in the US - one in Indiana, the other in Florida. Upon report of a MERS case in Indiana, staff initiated joint efforts with EOC and several affected jurisdictions to enhance the surveillance of MERS irrespective of jurisdictions’ preferred surveillance system.

Objective

To identify and monitor Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) like syndromes cases in the syndromic surveillance system.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The mission of the ISDS TCC is to bridge the gap between the analytic needs of public health practitioners and the expertise of researchers from other fields for the enhancement of disease surveillance, including situational awareness of chronic as well as infectious threats and follow-up activities such as case linkage and contact tracing. Committee activities to achieve this mission are identifying practical use cases, refining technical specifications in open forums, obtaining benchmark datasets for controlled dissemination, validating candidate methods, and sharing method documentation. In its first 2 years, the TCC has worked on three use cases and assisted with development of data use agreements to permit posting of benchmark datasets, http://www.syndromic.org/ communities/technical-conventions. Recent polling of the Biosense User Group indicated widespread interest in developing additional use cases. The proposed panel is intended to focus on practical applications of common interest, refine the use case development and dissemination process, and foster global interest in this process.

Objective

The main objective is to broaden the collection of use cases developed by the ISDS Technical Conventions Committee (TCC) to enhance effective collaboration between public health practice and analyst researchers in various disciplines and institutions. Panellists will present and motivate use case concepts including requirements for practical solution methods. Component objectives are to refine the presented use cases and to stimulate formation of new ones at local, state, and national levels.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

On May 28th, 2009, the ISDS Research and Public Health Practice Committees hosted a joint panel with the goal of bringing current challenges faced by public health practitioners to the attention of the research community at large. Members of both Committees expressed concern that much current research in disease surveillance has little application for public health practitioners. With an increasing emphasis on health information technology and exchange, public health practitioners need relevant, understandable analytic tools to manage information and make it useful.

The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 mandated establishing an integrated national public health surveillance system for early detection and rapid assessment of potential bioterrorism-related illness. In 2003, CDC created and launched the BioSense software program. At that time, CDC’s focus was on rapidly developing and implementing Web-based software to collect hospital emergency department data for analysis to detect and monitor syndromes of public health importance. During the ensuing decade, BioSense evolved and now is part of CDC’s renamed National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP). The broader vision of NSSP aims to achieve two key goals: significantly improve technical capabilities for collecting and analyzing syndromic surveillance data, and to create and facilitate opportunities for collaboration among local, state, and national public health programs. Through NSSP, the syndromic surveillance community can be strengthened by access to improved technical capacity and to best-practices knowledge sharing among syndromic surveillance professionals. These NSSP initiatives can help the nation-wide public health community strengthen situational awareness and enhance response capability to hazardous events. NSSP encompasses people, partners, policies, information systems, standards, and resources. Session attendees will learn more about NSSP, its growing group of partners, what the program is doing now, and its future.

Objective

Inform conference attendees about the CDC National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), various program-related projects and who is working on them, what was accomplished during the past year, and NSSP-development plans for the future.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Please join ISDS and CDC for an information webinar related to syndromic surveillance of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the US.On May 2, 2014, the first U.S. imported case of MERS was confirmed in Indiana.  Guidance was recently distributed for users of various syndromic surveillance systems to report conditions related to MERS to the CDC using the template developed (the guidance can be found by scrolling down to the MERS folder at this link).

ISDS Conference Call to discuss surveillance for severe respiratory illness / Enterovirus D68. This call will be an opportunity for syndromic surveillance practitioners to share their experiences conducting their contribution to surveillance for Enterovirus D68.



Discussion topics will include, but not be limited to, the following:

- Which syndromes are being used for surveillance of this issue? Respiratory? Asthma? ILI? Others?

- Are admissions being tracked?

- What age groups, if any, are being used?

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