Community of Practice Updates
NSSP CoP December Call Topics
Call for Success Stories
NSSP Lead Loren Rodgers (CDC/NSSP) kicked off the call by encouraging community members to submit examples of how their syndromic data and surveillance activities have been used for public health action or decision making during the COVID-19 response. To submit these success stories, please email syndromic@cste.org.
Success stories have many uses, one of which is helping state and national legislators understand our programs. Members of Congress are always interested in how work in their districts is being carried out by federal agencies and, more importantly, how appropriated funds are improving people’s lives.
Why do your stories matter? Your stories demonstrate transparency, partnership, and commitment to public health. Your stories provide the information we need to appeal to the interests of Congress.
Whether you’re taking steps to fulfill congressional mandates, collaborating with state or federal departments to expand data sharing, describing activities that advance state or local policy initiatives, or describing how you’ve spent funding, your stories provide the information we need to explain how syndromic surveillance improves public health. We know that public health programs transform communities and improve lives.
Availability of Non-NSSP Hospital Datasets
Rodgers announced that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has made several hospital datasets available through healthdata.gov. The HHS datasets include visualizations of facility-level emergency department metrics and several dashboards displaying these data. Rodgers emphasized that these metrics and dashboards are independent of NSSP and are not obtained through ESSENCE.
Should CELR Dataset Be Added to ESSENCE?
Rodgers proposed that NSSP add a new data source to ESSENCE—the Coronavirus Electronic Laboratory Reporting (CELR). The CELR dataset is produced from a flow of laboratory testing reported to state, tribal, local, or territorial public health departments and then to the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), to CDC, and, finally, to HHS Protect. Forty-eight jurisdictions send line-level CELR data, representing about 90% of the total laboratory testing volume.
CDC Introduces Tick Bite Dashboard for Public Use
Grace Marx (CDC) shared a preview of the public-facing Tick Bite Dashboard that uses syndromic surveillance data. Marx is a physician and epidemiologist with the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), one of NSSP’s many CDC collaborators. The dashboard includes several visualizations that show trends in ED visits identified by CDC’s tick bite query and include aggregated data from specific variables (HHS region of ED visit, week and month of ED visit, patient sex, and 10-year age category). The region-level dashboard is now available on CDC’s tick website (click Surveillance of ED Visits for Tick Bites) and will be updated weekly to provide public health officials with actionable data.
NCEZID has been receiving requests from public health partners for state-level data because of the seasonal variation in tick activity across states. In response, NCEZID has invited interested states to share aggregate data for the CDC tick bite query for inclusion in this public-facing dashboard. Once a state opts in, the dashboard will be revised to allow data filtering by that state. Data from public health jurisdictions that choose not to opt in will remain at the regional level.
Optimizing ESSENCE Data and SATScan to Detect Clusters
The remainder of the call focused on the month’s trending topic: “Sharing Current Uses of ESSENCE Data and SaTScan for Cluster Detection.” Community members had expressed interest during November’s 2020 Syndromic Surveillance Symposium in learning about cluster detection using ESSENCE tools, R, and SaTScan. SaTScan software is designed to conduct geographical surveillance of disease and to look for statistically significant clusters. SaTScan uses spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistics.
Howard Burkom (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab) kicked off the discussion with an overview of cluster detection and the significance of using spatial data. He was followed by panelists Sharon Greene (NYC), Natasha Close (WA), and Roseric Gbedegnon Azondekon (CDC). Greene discussed New York City’s use of SaTScan for cluster detection of reportable diseases and integration of SaTScan into public health practice and shared three links for attendees to view:
- Emerging Infectious Diseases “Daily Reportable Disease Spatiotemporal Cluster Detection, New York, City, New York, USA, 2014–2015”
- City of New York GitHub, Communicable Disease Surveillance
- medRxiv “Detecting Emerging COVID-19 Community Outbreaks at High Spatiotemporal Resolution—New York City, June–July 2020”
Close discussed Washington’s work to identify suspected opioid overdoses using SaTScan and her observations from the previous 6 months. Close also described her method for statistical analysis, which includes running a series of R scripts daily to identify elevation in visits for suspected opioid overdoses. Her R script uses an application programming interface (API) to pull ED visit records from NSSP–ESSENCE into R. Currently, Close runs three SaTScan analyses: hospital ZIP code, patient ZIP code, and hospital and patient ZIP code. Lastly, Roseric explained how SaTScan was used to monitor Severe Respiratory Injury (SRI) during the 2019 Vaping response.
Community Highlights
NSSP Community of Practice
- The monthly call topic, described above, is “Sharing Current Uses of ESSENCE Data and SaTScan for Cluster Detection.” Listen to the call here.
- Check out previous call recordings and other resources here.
NSSP CoP Core Committee
- The NSSP CoP Core Committee continues to meet monthly to discuss ongoing projects, priorities, and needs of the syndromic surveillance community.
- As a reminder, if you have a topic for Core Committee consideration, please reach out to the appropriate core committee member:
- Krystal Collier (AZ)—Core Committee Chair
- Yushiuan Chen (Tri-County, CO)—Core Committee Deputy Chair
- MisChele Vickers (AL)—Data Quality Subcommittee Co-Chair; Soon to be vacant! If interested, please email syndromic@cste.org by January 31, 2021.
- Diksha Ramnani (WI)—Data Quality Subcommittee Co-Chair
- Teresa Hamby (NJ)—Knowledge Repository Curation Subcommittee Chair
- Bill Smith (Maricopa Co., AZ)—Syndromic Surveillance and Public Health Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery Co-Chair
- Fatema Mamou (MI)—Syndromic Surveillance and Public Health Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery Co-Chair
- Rasneet Kumar (Tarrant Co., TX)—Syndrome Definition Subcommittee Co-Chair
- Rosa Ergas (MA)— Syndrome Definition Subcommittee Co-Chair
- Natasha Close (WA)—Technical Subcommittee Co-Chair
- Caleb Wiedeman (TN)—Technical Subcommittee Co-Chair
Data Quality (DQ) Subcommittee
- On the December DQ call, MisChele Vickers (AL) and Diksha Ramnani (WI) discussed priority data elements associated with the COVID-19 response. David Swenson (NH) presented on race and ethnicity percent completeness in New Hampshire with COVID-19 cases and emphasized the importance of standardizing data quality reporting so that health departments can compare data across jurisdictional lines. Amanda Dylina Morse (WA), one of the co-leads for the newly convened NSSP CoP Race and Ethnicity Workgroup, asked DQ subcommittee members to complete the workgroup’s assessment. The assessment gathers information about jurisdiction-level race and ethnicity data collection practices. Please join the workgroup Basecamp to include your public health jurisdiction’s response here .In closing, the DQ chairs summarized the subcommittee’s accomplishments in 2020.
- Check out previous call recordings and other resources from the DQ Subcommittee here.
Knowledge Repository (KR) Curation Subcommittee
- Check out the newly added content:
- Do you have syndromes, resources, or anything else related to syndromic surveillance that you would like considered for addition to the NSSP CoP Knowledge Repository? If so, please email syndromic@cste.org.
- Email syndromic@cste.org if you have issues with the Knowledge Repository.
Syndrome Definition (SD) Subcommittee
- During the December 2020 SD call, Zach Stein (CDC contractor) shared recently added CCDD categories: 1) Change in Taste or Smell v1, 2) ILI CCDD Neg Coronavirus DD v1, 3) ILI Syndrome Neg Coronavirus DD v1, 4) DoD COVID-Like Illness v1 (DoD data source only), and 5) CDC Vaccine Associated Adverse Events v1. Earlier in the year, the SD Subcommittee voted to develop a mental health syndrome. Kayla Anderson (CDC/NCIPC) and Lakshmi Radhakrishnan (CDC/CSELS) updated the subcommittee on the progress being made on a mental health syndrome that could estimate the prevalence of mental health problems presenting during emergency department visits and examine trends over time. They shared two approaches to developing the syndromes: 1) individual syndrome definitions for specific mental health conditions or illness presentations and 2) a broad overarching “any mental health” definition. Members were asked to provide feedback on the draft anxiety codes and definition query.
- Check out previous call recordings and other resources from the SD Subcommittee here.
Syndromic Surveillance and Public Health Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery (SPHERR) Subcommittee
- Check out previous call recordings and other resources from the SPHERR Subcommittee here.
Technical Subcommittee
- Check out previous call recordings and other resources from the Technical Subcommittee here.
If you have questions about the NSSP CoP, its highly collaborative user groups, the NSSP CoP Slack Workspace (a collaboration platform), or syndromic surveillance, please email syndromic@cste.org.
