Partnerships

Austin Public Health creates a variety of syndromic surveillance reports for events throughout the Austin, Texas metropolitan area. These events range from responses to major disasters such as the 2017 Hurricane Harvey sheltering to ongoing special event monitoring such as University of Texas football games and the Austin City Limits music festival. Partnerships within the Austin metropolitan region are crucial to ensuring the information-sharing necessary to create robust reports, as well as during the follow-up process of requesting feedback from partners on the usefulness of the reports. Austin Public Health's Public Health Emergency Preparedness program utilizes a variety of tools and resources to create informative, event-specific, and engaging reports, fulfilling multiple reporting needs for all partners.

Objective: Austin Public Health's Public Health Emergency Preparedness program utilizes a variety of tools and resources to create informative, event-specific, and engaging syndromic surveillance reports to share 1) internally within Austin Public Health; 2) with City of Austin and Travis County partners; 3) local health care coalition members; and 4) the public during events that affect the Austin, Texas metropolitan area.

The Georgia Power Corporation (GPC) provides power to 155 (97.5%) of the 159 counties in Georgia (GA), and employs 9,600 people throughout the state. GPC is engaged in preparing for pandemic influenza, and committed to protecting the critical infrastructure and ensuring its continuity of operations. The GPC employee “Crisis Absence Reporting Tool” (CART) was designed to provide the Georgia Syndromic

Surveillance (GA SS) Program with employee absentee/ reason to inform Public Health and GPC leadership about health events occurring in their employees statewide.

The GA SS Program has been implemented in 13 (72%) of the 18 Health Districts. In each of these locations, data are transferred from an ED, ambulatory care center, or school district to the Georgia Division of Public Health (GDPH) for analysis and dissemination of results to all stakeholders. GDPH wanted to collaborate with a large corporation with a statewide employee base to conduct absentee and reason for absence SS to provide an additional perspective to the existing data streams used by GA SS.

In GA, the LHD are responsible for organizing pandemic planning committees comprised of community partners to discuss continuity of basic services and maintenance of the critical infrastructure at the local level during an influenza pandemic. Increasing SS capacity is an important component of Local Health District (LHD) pandemic planning strategies in GA.

Objective

To create a non-traditional partnership between the GPC and the GDPH to aid in adverse health event detection and response activities during an influenza pandemic or other health emergency. This will include augmenting CART with SS data from the GA SS Program. These data will be analyzed by GA SS and results disseminated to LHDs, who monitor and respond to SS data in their jurisdictions. Analyses will also be provided to GPC to aid in resource allocation to ensure the continuity of services in GA during emergencies.

Syndromic surveillance has traditionally been used by public health in disease epidemiology. Partnerships between hospital-based and public health systems can improve efforts to monitor for disease clusters. Greenville Hospital System operates a syndromic surveillance system, which uses EARS-X to monitor chief complaint, lab, and radiological data for the four emergency departments within the hospital system. Combined, the emergency departments have approximately 145,000 visits per year. During March 2007 an increase in invasive group A Streptococcus (GAS) disease in the community lead to the use of syndromic surveillance to determine if there was a concomitant increase in Scarlet Fever within the community.

Objective

 Demonstrate the utility of collaboration between hospital-based and public health syndromic surveillance systems in disease investigation. Demonstrate the ability of syndromic surveillance in identification and evaluation of process improvements.