Presented November 29, 2017.
During this 60-minute session, Aaron Kite-Powell, M.S., from CDC and Wayne Loschen, M.S., from JHU-APL provide an overview of tips and tricks in ESSENCE to make it more useful for members and also answer questions regarding ESSENCE functions, capabilities and uses.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that after October 1, 2015, all HIPAA covered entities must transition from using International Classification of Diseases version 9 (ICD- 9) codes to using version 10 (ICD-10) codes (www.cms.gov). This will impact public health surveillance entities that receive, analyze, and report ICD-9 encoded data. Public health agencies will need to modify existing database structures, extraction rules, and messaging guides, as well as syndrome definitions and underlying analytics, statistical methodologies, and business rules. Implementation challenges include resources, funding, workforce capabilities, and time constraints for code translation and syndrome reclassification.
Objective
To describe the process undertaken to translate syndromic surveillance syndromes and sub-syndromes from ICD-9 diagnostic codes to ICD-10 codes and how these translations can be used to improve syndromic surveillance practice.
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 March 2010 webinar of the ISDS Public Health Practice Committee gave an overview regarding how Florida is incorporating visualizations of their reportable disease data into their syndromic surveillance system. The presentation was followed by a general discussion regarding the need for and benefits of comparing - on a regular, systematic basis - reportable disease data and syndromic surveillance data.
Presenters
Aaron Kite-Powell, MS, Bureau of Epidemiology, Florida Department of Health
Date
Presented June 28, 2010
This webinar was presented by the ISDS Public Health Practice Committee.
Presenters
Matt Laidler, MPH, MA, Florida Department of Health
Joann Schulte, DO, MPH, Florida Department of Health
Janet Hamilton, MPH, Florida Department of Health
Aaron Kite-Powell, MS, Florida Department of Health
Richard Hopkins, MD, MSPH, Florida Department of Health
HealthMap collects and aggregates information from online sources to generate outbreak alerts based on disease and geographic location. This project will assess the timeliness and sensitivity of HealthMap based on outbreak posts from EpiCom, the Florida Department of Health’s disease outbreak and health incident alert network.
Objective
To assess the outbreak detection utility of HealthMap, a publically available event-based biosurveillance system utilizing various internet-based media resources to identify outbreaks, at the state and local level. Results may help determine whether HealthMap should be monitored more closely as a supplementary surveillance tool.
By mid-May 2008, the State of Florida had 102 active wildfires affecting approximately 40,000 acres. In addition, the Mustang Corners Fire in Everglades National Park started on May 14 and burned throughout the month affecting another 40,000 acres of federal land. Smoke from several wildfires cast a haze over parts of south Florida, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a dense smoke advisory. The Governor declared a State of Emergency, the EOC was activated and ESF-8 requested that the Agency for Health Care Administration open a wildfire event in the Emergency Status System to track census and bed availability in the local hospitals.
Objective
We used the syndromic surveillance system ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics) to evaluate emergency room visits with respiratory related chief complaints in an area with decreased air quality associated with wildfires affecting South Florida, 2008.
Presented October 28, 2016.
We are going to briefly explore the tidytext, widyr, and flexdashboard packages to analyze word co-occurrence, look at ngrams, and then visualize the results in word network graphs. Looking at your data in this way can help the user gain an understanding of the underlying data.
Since the largest epidemic of Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) in recorded history began in Guinea in December 2013, the epidemic has spread to neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone resulting in an estimation of over 27,000 total cases and over 11,000 deaths to date. In response to the widespread social disruption caused by this epidemic in West Africa, President Obama committed approximately 2,000 US service members to deploy to the region and provide humanitarian aid. US military physicians were called upon to evaluate service members returning from West Africa (WA) to rule out EVD. The US military also has a considerable number of beneficiaries who travel to WA to visit friends and relatives placing them at risk for exposure to EBOV and the development of illness upon returning to the US.
We are conducting an expanded surveillance program that employs a standard questionnaire that all providers can use when evaluating a patient at-risk for EVD that will also capture information from historical encounters. The data collected from the questionnaire will be used to assess the frequency with which clinicians are called to evaluate patients for EVD and the resources required. However, we realize that many encounters may not be captured with this method, especially those that are not high enough risk to require consultation with infectious disease (ID) specialists, and are developing ways to screen the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to find additional patients.
Objective
To present methods of screening chief complaints and laboratory orders to find patients who presented for Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) screening, in order to determine the impact Ebola concern had on the Military Health System (MHS).
On October 1, 2015, the number of ICD codes will expand from 14,000 in version 9 to 68,000 in version 10. The new code set will increase the specificity of reporting, allowing more information to be conveyed in a single code. It is anticipated that the conversion will have a significant impact on public health surveillance by enhancing the capture of reportable diseases, injuries, and conditions of public health importance that have traditionally been the target of syndromic surveillance monitoring. For public health departments, the upcoming conversion poses a number of challenges, including: 1) Constraints in allocating resources to modify existing systems to accommodate the new code set, 2) Lack of ICD-10 expertise and training to identify which codes are most appropriate for surveillance, 3) Mapping syndrome definitions across code sets, 4) Limited understanding of the precise ICD-10 CM codes that will be used in the US Healthcare system, and 5) Adjusting for changes in trends over time that are due to transitions in usage of codes by providers and billing systems. To accommodate the ICD-9 to ICD-10 transition, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with the International Society of Disease Surveillance (ISDS) CoP to form a workgroup to develop the Master Mapping Reference Table (MMRT). This tool maps over 130 syndromes across the two coding systems to assist agencies in modifying existing database structures, extraction rules, and messaging guides, as well as revising established syndromic surveillance definitions and underlying analytic and business rules.
Objective
This roundtable will provide a forum for the syndromic surveillance Community of Practice (CoP) to discuss the public health impacts from the ICD-10-CM conversion, and to support jurisdictional public health practices with this transition. It will be an opportunity to discuss key impacts on disease surveillance and implementation challenges; and identify solutions, best practices, and needs for technical assistance.