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Stein Zachary

Description

The Kansas Syndromic Surveillance Program (KSSP) utilizes the ESSENCE v.1.20 program provided by the National Syndromic Surveillance Program to view and analyze Kansas Emergency Department (ED) data. Methods that allow an ESSENCE user to query both the Discharge Diagnosis (DD) and Chief Complaint (CC) fields simultaneously allow for more specific and accurate syndromic surveillance definitions. As ESSENCE use increases, two common methodologies have been developed for querying the data in this way. The first is a query of the field named “CC and DD.” The CC and DD field contains a concatenation of the parsed patient chief complaint and the discharge diagnosis. The discharge diagnosis consists of the last non-null value for that patient visit ID and the chief complaint parsed is the first non-null chief complaint value for that patient visit ID that is parsed by the ESSENCE platform. For this comparison, this method shall be called the CCDD method. The second method involves a query of the fields named, Chief Complaint History and œDischarge Diagnosis History. While the first requires only one field be queried, this method queries the CC History and DD History fields, combines the resulting data and de-duplicates this final data set by the C_BioSense_ID. Chief Complaint History is a list of all chief complaint values related to a singular ED visit, and Discharge Diagnosis History is the same concept, except involving all Discharge Diagnosis values. For this comparison, this method shall be called the CCDDHX method. While both methods are based on the same query concept, each method can yield different results.

Objective:

To compare and contrast two ESSENCE syndrome definition query methods and establish best practices for syndrome definition creation.

Submitted by elamb on

This syndrome was created to capture Kansas ED Visits with chief complaints related to carbon monoxide poisoning/exposure or similar diagnosis codes. The terms "heater" and "generator" are included to potentially capture cases of improper heater and generator use that did not receive relevant CO poisoning terms or codes.

Syndromic Surveillance System - ESSENCE

Data Source - Emergency Room Visits

Fields Used - CCDD (an ESSENCE-concatenated field of Chief Complaint and Discharge Diagnosis)

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created to capture records where the "exposure to forces of nature" diagnosis codes are sent, excluding Heat/Sunlight codes. The original syndrome captured all weather-related events that are explicitly stated and diagnosed, but the majority of these cases were sunburns and heat stroke. The original syndrome is also uploaded, but this syndrome will serve similar purposes as the original while excluding Heat/Sunlight cases when these are not of interest.

Syndromic Surveillance System - ESSENCE

Data Source - Emergency Room Visits

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created to capture cases where the "exposure to forces of nature" diagnosis codes are sent. This was created as a starting place for weather surveillance and should capture all weather-related events that are explicitly stated and diagnosed. Please note that if your region receives a lot of sun, the primary case counts in this syndrome definition will be sunburns. KDHE has uploaded a second similar syndrome that excludes these cases.

Syndromic Surveillance System - ESSENCE

Data Source - Emergency Room Visits

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created as a way to monitor Frostbite, Cold Exposure, & Hypothermia in Kansas Emergency Department visits. **Please note that the hypothermia portion of this syndrome was created to ONLY include hypothermia associated with low environmental temperature.

Syndromic Surveillance System - NSSP ESSENCE

Data sources - Emergency Room Visits

Fields Used - CCDD (an ESSENCE-concatenated field of Chief Complaint and Discharge Diagnosis)

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created to query NSSP ESSENCE for KS ED visits related to fireworks, particularly around the United States Independence Day holiday. Legality and slang for firework injuries will vary by region and some terms in this query are fairly region-specific.

Syndromic Surveillance System - NSSP ESSENCE

Data Source - Emergency Room Visits

Fields Used - Chief Complaint History, Discharge Diagnosis History OR CCDD (an ESSENCE-concatenated field of Chief Complaint and Discharge Diagnosis)

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created to query NSSP ESSENCE on Rabies Exposure and Rabies PEP S

Syndromic Surveillance System - NSSP ESSENCE

Data source - Emergency Room Visits

Fields used - Chief Complaint History and Discharge Diagnosis History OR CCDD (an ESSENCE-concatenated field of Chief Complaint and Discharge Diagnosis)

Submitted by ZSteinKS on

This syndrome was created to query ESSENCE for KS ED visits potentially associated with Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM). Diagnosis codes were provided to KDHE by a CDC AFM contact and originally included approximately 100 codes that could encompass most presentations of AFM. This code reflects a shortened list selecting those codes deemed most likely to accurately reflect AFM.

Syndromic Surveillance System - NSSP ESSENCE

Data Source - Emergency Room Visits

Fields Used - Discharge Diagnosis History

Submitted by ZSteinKS on
Description

Kansas storms can occur without warning and have potential to cause a multitude of health issues. Extreme weather preparedness and event monitoring for public health effects is being developed as a function of syndromic surveillance at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). The Syndromic Surveillance Program at KDHE utilized emergency department (ED) data to detect direct health effects of the weather events in the first 9 months of 2016. Current results show injuries directly related to the storms and also some unexpected health effects that warrant further exploration.

Objective

To evaluate syndrome definitions capturing storm- and extreme weather-related emergency department visits in Kansas hospitals participating in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP).

 

Submitted by uysz on