Our objective in this research is to take advantage of a supercomputer grid (TeraGrid) to develop a distributed memory national scale agent-based model (ABM) to study disease outbreaks at the micro level. This has data needs at both the national data surveillance and the local community structure and outbreak levels.
National Surveillance
One of the more recent successes of NSSP has been the introduction of more robust data quality monitoring and reporting. However, despite the increased insight into data quality, there are still concerns about data sharing and comparisons across sites. For NSSP to be most effective, users need to feel confident in sharing data and making comparisons across sites.
Objective:
As the BioSense Platform matures and more sites submit surveillance data, many in the community have voiced concerns about comparing data across sites. Recently, a number of jurisdictions from across the country were asked to provide opioid overdose data to a news agency highlighting the epidemic. Many jurisdictions requested information on how to present syndromic surveillance data from across sites and shared concern about how the data would be interpreted. This round table will address those concerns and explore options for comparing data across sites.
One of the early successes for the National Syndromic Surveillance Program's (NSSP's) BioSense Platform was community agreement on what should make up national and regional picture of the data. For NSSP to meet program objectives, National level surveillance and situational awareness had to be made available â not just to CDC, but to the entire community. To make this possible, the community had to agree on a limited dataset that would be sufficient to produce national and regional picture. Currently when NSSP staff at CDC or a particular program review HHS Regional data, they can only see trends at high levels. Although, this information is proving useful, when very unusual data spikes occur there is insufficient information to determine its public health significance. CDC would like to set up HHS Regional Epi groups made up of syndromic surveillance practitioners within regions in order to communicate about potentially unusual findings and discuss implications for local jurisdictions.
Objective:
Within the BioSense Platform, users have the ability to view HHS Region level data that can provide insight into what may be happening around the country. Epidemiologists can examine this information for changes in trends of subsyndromes or other potential issues of public health concern and compare it to their local data. However, the insight that regional data can provide is limited without better understanding of what is happening in the jurisdictions that make up the region. This round table will discuss the benefits of engaging with other jurisdictions within regions and attempt to define rules of engagement that can be used to facilitate interactions.