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.