The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 mandated establishing an integrated national public health surveillance system for early detection and rapid assessment of potential bioterrorism-related illness. In 2003, CDC created and launched the BioSense software program. At that time, CDC’s focus was on rapidly developing and implementing Web-based software to collect hospital emergency department data for analysis to detect and monitor syndromes of public health importance. During the ensuing decade, BioSense evolved and now is part of CDC’s renamed National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP). The broader vision of NSSP aims to achieve two key goals: significantly improve technical capabilities for collecting and analyzing syndromic surveillance data, and to create and facilitate opportunities for collaboration among local, state, and national public health programs. Through NSSP, the syndromic surveillance community can be strengthened by access to improved technical capacity and to best-practices knowledge sharing among syndromic surveillance professionals. These NSSP initiatives can help the nation-wide public health community strengthen situational awareness and enhance response capability to hazardous events. NSSP encompasses people, partners, policies, information systems, standards, and resources. Session attendees will learn more about NSSP, its growing group of partners, what the program is doing now, and its future.
Objective
Inform conference attendees about the CDC National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), various program-related projects and who is working on them, what was accomplished during the past year, and NSSP-development plans for the future.