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Stewart Miles

In the past 15 years, public health surveillance has undergone a revolution driven by advances in information technology (IT) with vast improvements in the collection, analysis, visualization, and reporting of health data. Mobile technologies and open source software have played a key role in advancing surveillance techniques, particularly in resource-limited settings. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is an internationally recognized leader in the area of electronic disease surveillance. In addition to the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE) used by several state and local jurisdictions and the CDC in the U.S., JHU/APL has also developed the Suite for Automated Global Electronic bioSurveillance (SAGES). SAGES is a collection of modular, open-source software tools designed to meet the challenges of electronic disease surveillance in resource-limited settings. JHU/APL is working with the Peruvian Navy health system to improve their electronic disease surveillance capabilities. The Peruvian Navy currently uses a SAGES-based system called Alerta DISAMAR that was implemented several years ago in an effort supported by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch, and in collaboration with the Naval Medical Research Unit No. 6 (NAMRU-6). The system uses both web-based and IVR-based (interactive voice response) data collection from several Navy health facilities in Peru. For the present effort, JHU/APL is implementing a new SMS-based data collection capability for the Peruvian Navy.

Objective: To introduce SMS-based data collection into the Peruvian Navy’s public health surveillance system for increased reporting rates and timeliness, particularly from remote areas, as well as improve capabilities for analysis of surveillance data by decision makers.

Submitted by elamb on

Hospital emergency departments in Cook and surrounding counties currently send data to the Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) instance of ESSENCE on CCDPH servers. The cloud instance of ESSENCE has been enhanced to receive and export all meaningful use data elements in the meaningful use format. The NATO summit provided the opportunity for a demonstration project to assess the ability of an Amazon GovCloud instance of ESSENCE to ingest and process meaningful use data, and to export meaningful use surveillance data to the Cook County Locker in BioSense 2.0.

Objective

In May 2012, thousands of protesters, descended on Chicago during the NATO Summit to voice their concern about social and economic inequality. Given the increased numbers of international and domestic visitors to the Windy City and the tension surrounding protesting during the summit, increased monitoring for health events within the city and Chicago metropolitan region was advised. This project represents the first use of cloud technology to support monitoring for a high profile event.

Submitted by uysz on

In November of 2011 BioSense 2.0 went live to provide tools for public health departments to process, store, and analyze meaningful use syndromic surveillance data. In February of 2012 ESSENCE was adapted to support meaningful use syndromic surveillance data and was installed on the Amazon GovCloud. Tarrant County Public Health Department agreed to pilot the ESSENCE system and evaluate its performance compared to a local version ESSENCE they currently used. The project determined the technical feasibility of utilizing the Internet cloud to perform detailed public health analysis, necessary changes needed to support meaningful use syndromic surveillance data, and any public health benefits that could be gained from the technology or data.

Objective:

This project represents collaboration among CDC’s BioSense Program, Tarrant County Public Health and the ESSENCE Team at the Johns Hopkins University APL. For over six months the Tarrant County Public Health Department has been sending data through the BioSense 2.0 application to a pilot version of ESSENCE on the Amazon GovCloud. This project has demonstrated the ability for local hospitals to send meaningful use syndromic surveillance data to the Internet cloud and provide public health officials tools to analyze the data both using BioSense 2.0 and ESSENCE. The presentation will describe the tools and techniques used to accomplish this, an evaluation of how the system has performed, and lessons learned for future health departments attempting similar projects.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Objective:

The objective of this project is to enable the ESSENCE system to read in, utilize, and export out meaningful use syndromic surveillance data using the Health Level 7 (HL7) v2.5 standard. This presentation will detail the technical hurdles with reading a meaningful use syndromic surveillance data feed containing multiple sources, deriving a common meaning from the varying uses of the standard and writing data out to a meaningful use HL7 2.5 format that can be exported to other tools, such as BioSense 2.0 (2). The presentation will also describe the technologies employed for facilitating this, such as Mirth, and will discuss how other systems could utilize these tools to also support processing meaningful use syndromic surveillance data.

Introduction:

In order to utilize the new meaningful use syndromic surveillance data sets that many public health departments are now receiving, modifications to their systems must be made. Typically this involves enabling the storage and processing of the extra fields the new standard contains. Open source software exists, such as Mirth Connect, to help with reading and interpreting the standard. However, issues with reliably reading data from one source to another arise when the standard itself is misunderstood. Systems that process this data must understand that while the data they receive is in the HL7 v2.5 standard format, the meaning of the data fields might be different from provider to provider. Additional work is necessary to sift thro

Submitted by jababrad@indiana.edu on

Biosurveillance Portal (BSP) is a web-based enterprise environment that is aimed to facilitate international collaboration, communication, and information-sharing in support of the detection, management, and mitigation of biological events in Korea. In Oct 2013, Republic of Korea (ROK) Ministry of National Defense has made the project agreement with United States (US) Department of Defense Joint Program Executive Office of Chemical and Biological Defense to develop Biosurveillance Portal which will provide tools and capabilities to facilitate timely identification and detection of biological events to minimize operational impacts on ROK-US Forces. As a part of this project, Armed Forces Medical Command (AFMC) undertook the initiative to develop the Military Active Realtime Syndromic Surveillance system.

Objective

This presentation aims to elaborate our experiences from initiating a syndromic surveillance system as a part of current biosurveillance developments in Korea. We developed Military Active Realtime Syndromic Surveillance (MARSS) system with data from all of 19 Korean military hospitals as a part of the US-ROK joint Biosurveillance Project.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
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