Description
An objective of the Joint VA/DoD BioSurveillance System for Emerging Biological Threats project is to improve situational awareness of the health of combined VA and DoD populations. DoD and VA both use versions of the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE). With a retrospective outpatient data collection available, we analyzed relative coverage and timeliness of the two systems to understand potential benefits of a joint system.
Objective
We determined the utility and effective methodology for combin- ing patient record information from the Departments of Veterans Af- fairs (VA) and Defense (DoD) health surveillance systems.