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ESSENCE

The NSSP Community of Practice hosted its 6th ESSENCE Q&A session on Monday, July 20, 2020. During the call, Aaron Kite-Powell (CDC) and Wayne Loschen (JHU-APL) provided NSSP-ESSENCE updates and answered the community's questions on ESSENCE functions and features.

View the webinar recording here or via the embedded video above.

Why the syndrome was created:

The purpose of the CDC Legionella v1 ESSENCE query is to capture potential visits related to Legionella. It is useful to identify potential cases for follow-up, conduct situation awareness and monitoring of outbreaks, and perform retrospective trend monitoring across geographic regions to identify possible disease hotspots, etc.

Data sources the syndrome was used on (e.g., emergency room, EMS, air quality):

Emergency room

Submitted by hmccall on

Why the syndrome was created:

The purpose of CDC Medication Refill v1 is to monitor visits for any medication/prescription that a patient may have run out of. Anything repetitive that needs routine refill visits - dialysis, oxygen, heart, BP, cholesterol.

Submitted by hmccall on
Description

The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) previously monitored Florida Poison Information Center (FPICN) data for timely detection of increases in carbon monoxide (CO) exposures before, during, and after hurricanes. Recent analyses have noted that CO poisonings have also increased with generator use and improper heating of homes during cold winter months in Florida. Similarly, increases in CO poisoning cases related to motor vehicles have been observed during summer months. CO is an odorless, colorless, poisonous gas causing sudden illness and death, if present in sufficient concentration in ambient air. The most common signs and symptoms include headache, nausea, lethargy/fatigue, weakness, abdominal discomfort/pain, confusion, and dizziness. 

Objective

This presentation summarizes Florida’s experience in identifying CO poisoning clusters using ESSENCE-based syndromic surveillance.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

Maryland’s electronic surveillance system for the early notification of community-based epidemics (ESSENCE) data includes emergency department visits from all acute care hospitals, over-the-counter medication sales and poison control data that cover all jurisdictions in Maryland. Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) uses ESSENCE daily for the early detection of public health emergencies. DHMH also utilizes ESSENCE for other purposes including situational awareness during high security events, assistance with outbreak investigation and for the H1N1 pandemic.

Objective

The purpose of this paper is to describe how Maryland’s syndromic surveillance system, electronic surveillance system for the early notification of community-based epidemics (ESSENCE), has many utilities including identifying threats, case investigation and situational awareness.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

The summer of 2010 in Maryland was characterized by unusually high temperatures. This type of increased and prolonged heat can potentially make residents sick, and extreme exposure can even kill people at highest risk. Numerous deaths throughout the state were attributed to this heat wave. The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene addressed this public health issue by using public messaging and maintaining constant situational awareness through the electronic syndromic surveillance. Thus, the electronic surveillance system for the early notification of community-based epidemics (ESSENCE) was used to monitor heat-related illnesses throughout the state.

 

Objective

This paper describes the use of ESSENCE, a syndromic surveillance system, to monitor heat-related illnesses throughout the state of Maryland during the summer of 2010.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

From January to March 2010, thirteen outbreaks of Norovirus infection were reported to the Epidemiology, Disease Control and Immunization Service (EDC-IS), up from four outbreaks in the entire 2008 and same number during 2009. Individual cases of Norovirus are not reportable in the State of Florida. That makes it difficult to track the onset, rise, peak, and fading of epidemics of this disease.

 

Objective

To demonstrate how the EDC-IS at the Miami-Dade County Health Department used ESSENCE to track gastrointestinal symptoms during a Norovirus epidemic.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

The Duval County Health Department (DCHD) serves a community of over one million people in Jacksonville, FL, USA. Each year, DCHD Epidemiology Program reports an average of 1133 (4-year average) notifiable diseases and conditions (NDC) with the exception of STD/HIV, TB, and viral hepatitis. Within Duval County, emergency medical care is provided by eight local hospitals, including one pediatric facility and a level-1 trauma center. These facilities contribute syndromic surveillance (SS) chief complaint (CC) data to the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics of Florida.

Historically, evaluations of SS systems have used ICD-9 diagnoses as the gold standard to determine predictive values. However, limited studies have surveyed reports of NDC to identify related emergency department (ED) visits and subsequent CC-based syndrome categorization. These data may provide public health investigators insight into health seeking behaviors, interpretation of SS signals, and prevalence of NDC within ED data.

 

Objective

This paper characterizes ED utilization among individuals diagnosed and reported with NDC. Furthermore, it evaluates the subsequent assignment of SS syndromes based on the patient’s CC during their ED visit.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE) obtains electronic data from 153 Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers plus outpatient clinics in all 50 states, American Samoa, Guam, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands. Currently, there is no centralized VA reporting requirement for nationally notifiable infectious conditions detected in VA facilities. Surveillance and reporting of cases to local public health authorities are performed manually by VA Infection Preventionists and other clinicians. In this analysis, we examined positive predictive value of ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes in VA ESSENCE to determine the utility of this system in electronic detection of reportable conditions in VA.

 

Objective

To determine the utility of ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes in the VA ESSENCE for detection and public health surveillance of nationally notifiable infectious conditions in veteran patients.

Submitted by hparton on

Held on June 19, 2019.

During this 90-minute session, Aaron Kite-Powell, M.S., from CDC and Wayne Loschen, M.S., from JHU-APL provided updates on the NSSP ESSENCE platform and answered the community's questions on ESSENCE functions and features.