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 âCC and DD.â 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 Discharge 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.