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Poison Center

Description

Introduction: response to this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CSTE, and the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) members created the Poison Center Public Health Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP acts as a platform, to facilitate sharing experiences, identify best practices, and develop relationships among federal agencies, state and local health departments (HD), and PCs. Since its inception, the CoP garnered over 250 members, hosted more than 25 webinars regarding PC-HD collaborations, and produced five newsletters highlighting subjects pertinent to PC and HD personnel. To date, the CoP's primary focus has been to strengthen PC-HD partnerships; however, recent events highlight opportunities to expand the public health impact of the CoP. In this roundtable, we will discuss how the CoP was leveraged by federal and state health agencies to build new multidisciplinary and inter-agency relationships and how these experiences have led to the proposed guidance.

Objective: - To discuss the development of a set of tools for interagency collaborations on health surveillance - To determine the core contents of the tools based on known gaps in health surveillance - To determine collaborators in development and timelines for completion

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Florida Department of Health has developed a statewide syndromic surveillance system based on the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). Authorized users can currently access data from the Florida Poison Information Center Network (FPICN), Emergency Room chief complaints, Florida reportable disease system (Merlin) and the Florida death records through ESSENCE under one portal. The purpose of this paper is to summarize efforts to enhance statewide real-time chemical surveillance by incorporating FPICN data into ESSENCE.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

Oregon Health Authority (OHA), in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, recently implemented Oregon ESSENCE, an automated, electronic syndromic surveillance system. One way to strengthen syndromic surveillance is to include data from multiple sources. We are integrating data from emergency departments, state notifiable conditions and vital statistics, and the Oregon Poison Center (OPC). Implementing ESSENCE in Oregon provided the opportunity to automate poison center surveillance, which was previously done manually. In order to achieve this, OHA needed a daily data feed of OPC data to upload into Oregon ESSENCE servers. For OPC to do this directly, they would have incurred significant costs to develop the necessary electronic infrastructure to query and send the data; furthermore, OPC does not employ IT staff. OHA does not currently have funding available to support IT system interoperability with Oregon ESSENCE, so we sought a low-cost solution that would build upon existing systems that utilized the National Poison Data System (NPDS) web service.

Objective

Enhance Oregon ESSENCE by integrating data from the Oregon Poison Center (OPC) in a cost-effective manner.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

NPDS is a national database of detailed information collected from each call, uploaded in near real-time, from the 57 participating regional poison centers (PCs) located across the US. NPDS is owned and operated by the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC). Since 2001, scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collaborated with AAPCC to use NPDS for surveillance of chemical, poison and radiological exposures. In March of 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami damaged the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, causing a radiological incident classified as a "major accident" according to the International Nuclear Event Scale. The incident resulted in the release of radioactive iodine (I-131) into the global environment, which was detected in precipitation in parts of the United States. While no adverse health effects were expected, concerned citizens contacted public health officials at the local, state and federal levels. Many started to acquire and use potassium iodide (KI) and other iodide-containing products intended for thyroid protection from I-131, even though this was not a public health recommendation by state and federal public health agencies. Shortly after international media coverage began, regional PCs began receiving calls regarding the Japan radiological incident. State and federal health officials were interested in identifying health communication needs and targeting risk communication messages to address radiation concerns and KI usage recommendations as part of the public health response. This was done in part through NPDS-based surveillance.

Objective

To describe how the National Poison Data System (NPDS) was used for surveillance of individuals with potential incident-related exposures in the United States resulting from the Japan earthquake radiological incident of 2011. Our secondary objective is to briefly describe the process used to confirm exposures identified through NPDS-based surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on

The Oregon ESSENCE team has developed a guide for other states to use to set up a web service link to their poison center and extract its data into ESSENCE. It contains advice based on Oregon’s experience in developing its link with its poison center and NDPS, a plug-&-play (almost) Rhapsody configuration file (and instructions) to install, and data dictionaries provided by NPDS.

The publication date is February 1, 2019.

Submitted by ctong on
Description

NC DETECT is the Web-based early event detection and timely public health surveillance system in the North Carolina Public Health Information Network. The reporting system also provides broader public health surveillance reports for emergency department visits related to hurricanes, injuries, asthma,  vaccine-preventable diseases, environmental health and others. NC DETECT receives data on at least a daily basis from four data sources: emergency departments, the statewide poison center, the statewide EMS data collection system, a regional wildlife center and laboratory data from the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine. Data from select urgent care centers are in pilot testing.

 

Objective

Managers of the NC DETECT surveillance system wanted to augment standard tabular Web-based access with a Web-based spatial-temporal interface to allow users to see spatial and temporal characteristics of the surveillance data. Users need to see spatial and temporal patterns in the data to help make decisions about events that require further investigation. The innovative solution using Adobe Flash and Web services to integrate the mapping component with the backend database will be described in this paper.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Safe drinking water is essential for all communities. Intentional or unintentional contamination of drinking water requires water utilities and local public health to act quickly. The Water Security (WS) initiative of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a multi-faceted approach involving water utilities and local public health officials (LPH) to identify, communicate, contain, and mitigate a drinking water contamination event. Components of WS include: online water quality monitoring, enhanced security monitoring, consumer complaint surveillance, and innovative uses of public health surveillance data streams. LPH already use multiple surveillance data systems to recognize disease events in a timely manner. However, few of these systems can be integrated or specifically designed for detection of drinking water contamination incidents.

 

Objective

This poster describes the integration of public health surveillance data as a component of an early warning system for detection of a drinking water contamination incident.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT) is the Web-based early event detection and timely public health surveillance system in the North Carolina Public Health Information Network. At the present time NC DETECT monitors five data sources: emergency departments, the statewide poison center, the statewide EMS data collection system, a regional wildlife center and laboratories from the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine for suspicious patterns. NC DETECT receives Carolinas Poison Control Center (CPC) data every 24 hours as of August, 2005. CPC provides the poison hotline for the entire state and handles over 105,000 calls a year 24/7/365. Seventy-five percent of calls are from the general public, with the remainder originating from healthcare providers, pharmacists, law enforcement, etc. CPC is staffed by registered nurses and pharmacists specially trained to provide diagnostic and treatment advice for acute and chronic poisonings to the public and healthcare professionals, backed up by board-certified medical toxicologists.

 

Objective

This paper describes the use of CPC data for early detection of chemical and environmental events and the follow up protocol development process.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT) provides early event detection and public health situational awareness to hospital-based and public health users statewide. Authorized users are currently able to view data from emergency departments (n=110), the statewide poison control center, the statewide EMS data system, a regional wildlife center and pilot data from a college veterinary laboratory as well as select urgent care centers. While NC DETECT has over 200 registered users, there are public health officials, hospital clinicians and administrators who do not access the system on a regular basis, but still like to be kept abreast of syndromic trends in their jurisdictions. In order to accommodate this interest and reduce redundant data entry among active users, we developed a summary report that can be easily exported and distributed outside of NC DETECT.

 

Objective

This paper describes a user driven weekly syndromic report designed and developed to improve the efficiency of sharing syndromic information statewide.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT) serves public health users across NC at the local, regional and state levels, providing early event detection and situational awareness capabilities. At the state level, our primary users are in the General Communicable Disease Control Branch of the NC Division of Public Health. NC DETECT receives 10 different data feeds daily including emergency department visits, emergency medical service runs, poison center calls, veterinary laboratory test results, and wildlife treatment.

In order to fulfill our users’ needs with NC DETECT’s limited staff, business intelligence tools are utilized for the acquisition and processing of our multiple, disparate data sources as well as reporting our findings to our numerous end users. Business intelligence can be described as a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.

 

Objective

We report here on how NC DETECT uses business intelligence tools to automate both data capture and reporting in order to run a comprehensive surveillance system with limited resources.

Submitted by elamb on