In 2021, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and CDC’s NSSP partnered with the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) and Ruvos on a project to route mortality data through the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events (STEVE) into NSSP ESSENCE.
ESSENCE
Washington State (WA) has developed and recorded three ESSENCE trainings for their staff. These include trainings for basic, intermediate, and advanced ESSENCE skills.
WA ESSENCE Trainings
In July 2021, NSSP announced the release of the Rnssp R package which facilitates access to the ESSENCE system via a secure and simple interface. Rnssp provides methods that streamline the data pull and simplify R code previously required by users to pull data via the APIs using the keyring library. In this tutorial demonstrates how to pull data from the ESSENCE system using Rnssp.
Background: The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE) is a secure web-based tool that enables health care practitioners to monitor health indicators of public health importance for the detection and tracking of disease outbreaks, consequences of severe weather, and other events of concern.
On April 29, 2021, CSTE, NSSP, and the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) provided an overview of an ongoing pilot project to improve data collection and reporting mortality data through the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events (STEVE) to ESSENCE.
The NSSP Community of Practice hosted its 6th ESSENCE Q&A session on Monday, July 20, 2020. During the call, Aaron Kite-Powell (CDC) and Wayne Loschen (JHU-APL) provided NSSP-ESSENCE updates and answered the community's questions on ESSENCE functions and features.
View the webinar recording here or via the embedded video above.
Description
The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) previously monitored Florida Poison Information Center (FPICN) data for timely detection of increases in carbon monoxide (CO) exposures before, during, and after hurricanes. Recent analyses have noted that CO poisonings have also increased with generator use and improper heating of homes during cold winter months in Florida. Similarly, increases in CO poisoning cases related to motor vehicles have been observed during summer months. CO is an odorless, colorless, poisonous gas causing sudden illness and death, if present in sufficient concentration in ambient air. The most common signs and symptoms include headache, nausea, lethargy/fatigue, weakness, abdominal discomfort/pain, confusion, and dizziness. This presentation summarizes Florida’s experience in identifying CO poisoning clusters using ESSENCE-based syndromic surveillance.
Referenced File
Held on June 19, 2019.
During this 90-minute session, Aaron Kite-Powell, M.S., from CDC and Wayne Loschen, M.S., from JHU-APL provided updates on the NSSP ESSENCE platform and answered the community's questions on ESSENCE functions and features.
Description
Timely influenza data can help public health decision-makers identify influenza outbreaks and respond with preventative measures. DoD ESSENCE has the unique advantage of ingesting multiple data sources from the Military Health System (MHS), including outpatient, inpatient, and emergency department (ED) medical encounter diagnosis codes and laboratory-confirmed influenza data, to aid in influenza outbreak monitoring. The Influenza-like Illness (ILI) syndrome definition includes ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes that may increase the number of false positive alerts. Laboratory-confirmed influenza data provides an increased positive predictive value (PPV). The gold standard for influenza testing is molecular assays or viral culture. However, the tests may take 3-10 days to result. Rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) have a lower sensitivity, but the timeliness of receiving a result improves to within <15 minutes. We evaluate the utility of RIDTs for routine ILI surveillance.
Objective: To describe influenza laboratory testing and results in the Military Health System and how influenza laboratory results may be used in DoD Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE)