Stephens Bill

Although the advent of the ONCs "meaningful use" criteria has added significant new incentives for healthcare organizations to provide the necessary data for implementing syndromic surveillance, incentives alone are not sufficient to sustain a robust community of practice that engages public health and healthcare practitioners working together to fully achieve meaningful use objectives. The process for building a successful community of practice around syndromic surveillance is primarily application-agnostic. The business process has many of the same characteristics regardless of application features, and can be incrementally customized for each community based on the unique needs and opportunities and the functional characteristics of the application. This presentation will explore lessons-learned in the north central Texas region with BioSense 1 and ESSENCE over the past six years, and will describe the multi-phase process currently underway for BioSense 2.0. Key program process steps and success criteria for public health and healthcare practitioners will be described. This road map will enable other local health department jurisdictions to replicate proven methodologies in their own communities. The presentation will also highlight what it takes for an existing community of practice with a home grown system to move processes and protocols to the cloud.

Objective

To explore the lessons learned from the Advanced Practice Center methodology regarding the implementation of syndromic surveillance while considering what it takes to create, enhance, and sustain relationships between hospitals, public health practitioners, and the community.

Recognizing the threat of pandemic influenza and new or emerging disease such as SARS, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has recommended that schools work in partnership with their local health departments “to develop a surveillance system that would alert the local health department to substantial increases in absenteeism among students.”3 Tarrant County’s pilot project system meets that need and transcends absenteeism data; it seeks to quantify ILI in schools and lets school nurses view daily maps of changing disease patterns, access flu prevention resources, and receive and respond to action items suggested by TCPH. While the focus is on seasonal flu, best practices for mitigating seasonal flu also apply to pandemic flu. Because the system uses open source software4 , it’s affordable and replicable for other public health agencies seeking to strengthen their school partnerships as well as their local or regional biosurveillance capabilities.

Objective

This oral presentation will share key findings and next steps following the first year of a pilot project in which Tarrant County, Texas schools used a Web-based system to share their daily health data with Tarrant County Public Health (TCPH) epidemiologists, who can use ESSENCE1 to analyze the data. The projectís ongoing goal is to reduce the magnitude of flu outbreaks by focusing on school-aged children and youth, where infectious diseases often emerge first and spread rapidly.2