Situational Awareness

Intense stress can severely degrade one's ability to process and utilize new kinds of information.1 This psychological phenomena may partially explain why epidemiologist are challenged to communicate and establish the value of SyS information with emergency management professionals (EMPs). Despite the timely and useful insights that SyS data and methods can provide, it is very difficult to convey what these data are when EMPs and epidemiologists are working to make intense, highly-scrutinized and high-consequence emergency decisions. If state and local authorities want emergency plans and responses that benefit from the powerful insights that SyS can provide, epidemiologists need to learn how to best report information and establish a strong rapport before emergencies strike. Over the past ten months, ISDS’s NSSP’s Syndromic Surveillance and Public Health Emergency Preparedness, Response and Recovery (SPHERR) Committee has worked to identify gaps, potential best practices, document use cases, and identify tools for integration of SyS data in EM activities. During SPHERR practice exchange meetings, SyS professionals have consistently cited effective communication between SyS staff and emergency preparedness staff as a top priority in integrating SyS more fully into all phases of emergencies.

Objective: Identify and document strategies that enhance the value of syndromic surveillance (SyS) data and information for the response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness needs of local and state emergency management professionals in the U.S.

The 2012 National Strategy for Biosurveillance (BSV) recognizes that a well-integrated national BSV enterprise must provide essential information for better decision making at all levels. Submitting an electronic bill following HC services is the most mature and widely used form of eHealth. HIPAA-compliant eHRCs captured in e-commerce can be consolidated into big HC data centers and used for many purposes including BSV. eHRCs are standardized and each claim contains pertinent person, place, and time information that can be leveraged for BSV. IMS Health (IMS) is a global HC information company and maintains one of worldÕs largest eHealth data centers that processed information including eHRCs on >260M unique U.S. patients in 2012.

Objective

This paper describes how high-volume electronic healthcare (HC) reimbursement claims (eHRCs) from providers' offices and retail pharmacies can be used to provide timely and accurate influenza-like illness (ILI) situational awareness at state and CBSA levels

As part of a greater statewide excessive heat response plan, New Hampshire (NH) has been performing HRI surveillance since 2010 to guide response efforts and ultimately reduce HRI morbidity and mortality during situations of excessive heat. Historically, NH hospital Emergency Department Heat illness discharges average around 150 per year, typically in the summer months. NHÕs Excessive Heat Emergency Response Plan documents appropriate state-wide readiness, alerting, emergency, and recovery level of response for heat emergencies with its partners. Together with near real-time surveillance data, flexible query tools, and communication templates, NH is better able to respond to excessive heat emergencies at a moment's notice and take action with its partners to reduce HRI emergencies. Objective: During this presentation NH Division of Public Health Services (NH DPHS) will share how it was able to develop an effective HRI surveillance response through the development of partners, which allowed State of NH decision makers to affect action beyond detection.

The recent focus on the 'One Medicine' concept has resulted in an increased awareness that the control of diseases in animal populations, whether zoonotic or not, can be of great public health importance. Zoonotic and foodborne diseases represent an immediate threat to the health of human populations, while rapid spreading diseases in animals can compromise the food-supply and the economy of a country or region. On the other hand, animal populations can serve as sentinels, and continued surveillance can prevent the emergence and/or rapid spread of pathogens potentially harmful to humans. However, awareness of the activities developed in the field of animal health is still low among public health workers. To date, the cooperation between public health and animal health epidemiologists has mainly involved the control of outbreaks of foodborne diseases. Greater cooperation between the two fields, however, could improve prevention and reduce the number of such outbreaks.

Objective

To discuss opportunities to improve the synergy between animal and public health and increase awareness, among public health workers, of the concept of animal health.

Situational awareness is important for both early warning and early detection of a disease outbreak, and analytics and tools that furnish information on how an infectious outbreak would either emerge or unfold provide enhanced situational awareness for decision makers/analysts/public health officials, and support planning for prevention or mitigation. Data sharing and expert analysis of incoming information are key to enhancing situational awareness of an unfolding event. In this presentation, we will describe a suite of tools developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that provide actionable information and knowledge for enhanced situational awareness during an unfolding event; The biosurveillance resource directory (BRD), the biosurveillance analytics resource directory (BaRD) and the surveillance window app (SWAP).

Objective

To develop a suite of tools that provides actionable information and knowledge for enhanced situational awareness during an unfolding event such as an infectious disease outbreak.

During the past decade, public health practitioners have implemented various new syndromic and other advanced surveillance systems to supplement their existing laboratory testing and disease surveillance toolkit. While much of the development and widespread implementation of these systems had been supported by public health preparedness funding, the reduction of these monies has greatly constrained the ability of public health agencies to staff and maintain these systems. The appearance of H3N2v and other novel influenza A viruses, requires agencies to carefully choose which systems will provide the most cost-effective data to support their public health practice. The global emergence of influenza A H7N9, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and other viruses associated with high mortality, emphasize the importance of maintaining vigilance for the presence of emerging disease.

Objective

To review approaches used by public health agencies for alerting health care providers and enhancing surveillance systems to identify the presence of novel respiratory disease and to characterize their recent experience in searching for globally emerging viruses.