Community of Practice Updates

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Policy for Federal Access to NSSP Data

During the November 2022 CoP Monthly meeting, Acting NSSP Lead Karl Soetebier informed the community of efforts to make NSSP data more accessible and to improve collaboration toward common goals.

In early December 2022, Soetebier updated site administrators of NSSP’s ongoing work related to data use. He explained how expanded access to NSSP data during the COVID-19 public health emergency enabled innovation in areas such as trend indicators and classification, anomaly detection, and text mining by age and geography. The ability to work this way routinely, outside the context of a public health emergency, is not permitted by the current data use agreement.

In early 2023, to build on public health response innovations and to continue to enhance data use, CDC began designing a new NSSP agreement to incorporate lessons learned from the COVID-19 response, enable close collaboration between sites and CDC, enable new innovations and services for sites, and maximize responsible use of data and provide timelier synthesis of findings and recommendations. Further, this agreement would help respond to the top concerns raised by public health departments in the Review of Federal Access to National Syndromic Surveillance Program Data: Findings and Implementation Strategies, posted by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) in February 2023.

CDC has made a thoughtful choice to change from a data use agreement (DUA) to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to better reflect the collaborative nature of the agreement. By refocusing the DUA as an MOU, the collaborative and participatory goals of the partnership across federal, state, and local public health authorities become more transparent. Details of the DUA/MOU are being worked through.

Save the Date! 4th Annual Syndromic Surveillance Symposium

The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), in collaboration with CDC, is excited to announce that the 4th Annual Syndromic Surveillance Symposium will be held virtually December 5–7, 2023. Please save the date—and keep in mind there’s no registration fee for this symposium. We ask all interested participants to complete the registration form by November 20, 2023.

Questions? Please contact CSTE at syndromic@cste.org.

NSSP CoP Monthly Meeting

The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) Community of Practice (CoP) met on August 23, 2023. On average, 100 to 120 people participate in these monthly meetings. Recordings for CoP monthly calls are posted in the Knowledge Repository.

NSSP Updates: Tool for Viewing COVID-19, Influenza, and RSV

CDC Director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, wants the agency to be response ready. This is a critical priority of hers, which includes using innovation to analyze and share surveillance data quickly and improve access to respiratory virus data.

The current dashboard was updated this month to allow users to view state-level data drawn from NSSP for ED visits with COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) diagnoses. (Data are also visualized at the national level by age group.) The dashboard displays state-level trends in percent of total ED visits for each condition (i.e., number of COVID-19 diagnosis visits out of the total number of ED visits across all causes) and the combined category (i.e., total number of COVID-19, RSV, and influenza diagnosis visits combined out of the total number of ED visits across all causes). Data are updated weekly.

Jurisdiction Overviews

This month’s presentation featured Erin Kinder from South Dakota and Daniel Bedford from Wisconsin. They described how their syndromic surveillance programs are set up, projects they’re working on, and upcoming projects. This led to a robust discussion on topics including onboarding of facilities and the added benefit of using urgent care data.

To sign up to present an overview of your jurisdiction on an upcoming NSSP CoP monthly call, please complete this form. You can hear more about these jurisdictions and listen in to the discussion here.

Syndromic Surveillance of Weather Events

Communities across the United States have experienced many challenging weather-related events this year, from wildfires and extreme heat to hurricanes. Andrew Farrey (KY) and Diksha Ramnani (County of Monterrey, CA) gave a brief overview of tools available to NSSP users that can be used in surveillance of such events. Tools include the ESSENCE weather data source; air quality data source; dashboards in myESSENCE library; and syndrome definitions for cold-related illness, heat-related illness, and carbon monoxide illness. Andrew mentioned that urgent care data have been useful during natural disaster events when hospitals lose power or suffer damage affecting data flow into ESSENCE.

Listen to the August presentation for practical ways to improve syndromic surveillance of weather-related events. We also encourage you to continue the discussion on the #environmental-health-and-severe-weather Slack channel.

NSSP CoP New Member Orientation

The NSSP CoP hosted its first new member orientation in August and it was attended by over 180 community members! Topics covered included an overview of the CoP, its organization, charter, and subcommittees and user groups, an overview of available resources, and ways to get involved in the community. If you missed it, the recording and slides are available for viewing. Upcoming orientations will be held once per quarter and CSTE will send invites to new NSSP CoP members.

Published to the Knowledge Repository

The Oregon Public Health Division, Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention, has posted a document on “Using Weather and Environmental Data in ESSENCE.” This document for Oregon ESSENCE users contains practical information applicable to others who are interested in creating and interpreting time series graphs that overlay health, weather, or air quality data for a geographic area. The document includes health outcomes sensitive to weather and environmental conditions and step-by-step guidance for making a time series graphs in ESSENCE.