The use of R is increasing in the public health disease surveillance community. The ISDS pre-conference workshops and newly formed R Group for Surveillance have been well attended and continue to grow in popularity. The use of R in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) has also been of value to many users who wish to analyze and visualize public health data using custom R scripts. This interest in R, combined with a desire from many ESSENCE users to create custom analytics and visualizations, led to a summer internship project to look into the feasibility and ways R could be integrated into ESSENCE.
Objective
The objective of this project is to give users the ability to run custom R scripts from within the ESSENCE system. This capability would allow for custom analytics and visualizations to be baked into the system for daily use. It would also provide a sandbox area for new ideas and features to be tested before being developed more fully into the ESSENCE codebase for a more seamless use in the future. The project must do this while maintaining a secure environment for public health data to reside.