Community of Practice Updates

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Policy for Federal Access to NSSP Data

Review with caption

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 is in the process of adopting a new approach to data use agreements (DUAs) with public health jurisdictions for multiple jurisdictional data types and will include NSSP data in this process. Under the new approach, the collaborative and participatory goals of the partnership across federal, state, and local public health authorities become more transparent.

Data sharing and data exchange remain a high priority for CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI). The details of Data Use Agreements and Memorandums of Understanding were examined by CDC’s Advisory Committee to the Director. The Committee’s Data and Surveillance Workgroup identified priority areas in which data sharing and data exchange can be improved, one of which affects jurisdictions that conduct syndromic surveillance:

  • Define minimal data necessary for core data sources,1 with an emphasis on data quality, harmonization, and standardization.
1CDC’s six core data sources for electronic disclosure: case data, laboratory-based diagnostic testing data, syndromic surveillance/emergency department data, immunization/vaccine administration data, hospital capacity data, and death data/vital statistics.

This is our final update on Federal Access to NSSP Data. CDC has taken a high-level look across its agreements/shared understandings to develop long-term solutions that will work for NSSP and other CDC program areas. Updates that affect the community will be included in the monthly CoP calls.

RESOURCE

CDC Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) Data and Surveillance Workgroup (DSW) Data and Surveillance Workgroup Report. 

NSSP CoP Monthly Meeting

The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) Community of Practice (CoP) met on September 27, 2023. On average, 100 to 200 people participate in these monthly meetings. Recordings for CoP monthly calls are posted in the Knowledge Repository.

NSSP Updates

NSSP Acting Lead Karl Soetebier updated the community:

  • NSSP completed its 2.10 release for the Access & Management Center (AMC). The release included changes to improve AMC functions and included additions to refine the Date Quality (DQ) Dashboard (e.g., addition of C_Patient Class variable for filtering specific types of visits and looking at data quality). This release included the launch of NSSP PRESS, which can be used to broadly share various NSSP products for reporting and analysis. More will be shared about NSSP PRESS on the next CoP call.
  • We want to thank to everyone who worked on this release and the participants who conducted user acceptance testing.
  • On September 6, 2023, CDC launched a new webpage on CDC.gov to help protect people from COVID-19, Influenza, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). New dashboards feature data from NSSP and display emergency department data stratified by respiratory condition.
  • The next update to this dashboard will integrate content and visualizations about severe viral illness, hospital occupancy, and groups most impacted by respiratory viruses. A national view of emergency department data stratified by sex, race, and ethnicity will also be added to the current national view of ED visits, as initiated last winter, and will be stratified by age. The new views will be similar to the existing view. The national one-year trend will be presented for COVID-19, influenza, RSV, and for the combined category based on percent of visits. This information will be drawn from data sources across CDC.
middle aged couple looking over shoulder while on computer

Here’s Why CDC Implemented a New, Interactive Dashboard

  • To protect people this fall and winter when respiratory viruses—like COVID-19, flu, and RSV—can spread at the same time.
  • To enable people to select their state and see the percent of emergency department visits from COVID-19, flu, RSV, or all three combined.
  • To help people make better health decisions through new ways of visualizing respiratory virus data.

Jurisdiction Overviews

This month, Diksha Ramnani from Monterey County (CA) and Levi Schlosser (ND) provided an overview of how their syndromic surveillance programs are set up, projects they’re working on, and opportunities that they’re planning to work on in the future. Their presentations led to robust discussion on topics including dashboards and application programming interfaces (APIs).

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 in the September recording.

Syndromic Surveillance for Behavioral Health

Lauren Gracy (KS) described the association between ED visits for risk factors of suicide and suicide attempts. Lauren hopes the results of this study will inform healthcare partners to expand the use of suicide screenings in EDs for patients with identified risk factors.

Lakshmi Radhakrishnan (CDC) summarized a recent MMWR report that studied the seasonal trends in behavioral ED visits in school-aged children. This report was co-authored by 8 state and local health departments. You can continue the discussion about these MMWR findings in the NSSP Community of Practice Slack Workspace.

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. This free, virtual event is a great opportunity for the syndromic surveillance community to exchange experiences, share best practices, and take away innovative solutions and strategies for advancing the practice of syndromic surveillance. 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.

If you have questions, please contact syndromic@cste.org.

Reminders and Announcements

  • Expanded Look at Public Health Jurisdictional Work to be Added to NSSP CoP Meetings: The NSSP CoP is excited to highlight the great work being done by members. Each month, representatives from three to four public health jurisdictions will give a brief presentation about their program, projects, partner interaction, challenges, and goals. We encourage local, territorial, and tribal jurisdictions of all sizes and in all stages of program development to participate. To sign up to present on an upcoming call, please complete this form.
  • Join the Community and a subcommittee: Our Community is a great way to meet others working in syndromic surveillance and advance the work of syndromic surveillance at all jurisdictional levels. Become part of the Community or update your NSSP CoP membership to join a subcommittee here. Encourage others to join, too!
    • Join and participate in the Slack workspace. This space is full of rich discussion among colleagues. This is an opportunity to collaborate with your peers outside CoP meetings.
    • Submit success stories to be featured in NSSP Update and on the NSSP CoP website. You do valuable work every day that we want to highlight.
    • Submit a topic for future NSSP CoP monthly calls. These calls are meant for the community, and we want to know what is most important to you.
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