Integration of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Data Into Essence-FL to Support Public Health Surveillance and Response During a Mass Gathering Event: The 2012 Republican National Convention

BACKGROUND: Historically, data collected from deployed federal mobile medical teams have been an integral part of mass gathering and emergency response efforts; however, logistical issues, resource intensive manual data collection processes, and delayed analysis have made surveillance challenging.  The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to implement a new process for conducting public health surveillance among those presenting for care to ASPR medical teams. The purpose of this study was to field-test the operational effectiveness of the newly implemented ASPR data module in ESSENCE-FL (web-based syndromic surveillance system) to receive near real-time automated data feeds from ASPR assets during the 2012 Republican National Convention (RNC).

METHODS: ESSENCE-FL was configured to receive ASPR Electronic Medical Record System (EMR-S) data.  A scheduled program to generate data files for FDOH was created using SAS and a script set up on the ASPR server to send an updated file via secure file transfer protocol (sftp). To assess completeness of data elements received in ESSENCE-FL, field teams maintained line lists of patient encounters.  ASPR data were reviewed and analyzed by FDOH staff multiple times a day in near real-time utilizing existing ESSENCE-FL analysis tools.

RESULTS: Three separate ASPR missions were deployed to Florida to support the RNC.  ASPR EMR-S data files were received at 15-minute intervals by ESSENCE-FL during each day of the event (August 26-30).  Reduced patient counts within ESSENCE-FL as compared with field-maintained line lists indicated an incomplete input or transfer of patient data.  Although only 11 of 34 total patient encounters were received by ESSENCE-FL during the event, the system design enabled users to run specific queries and display the results in graphs, charts and tables.

CONCLUSIONS: The collaboration of local, state and federal agencies can make data sharing and analysis efficient and effective as evidenced during the RNC and can now be implemented during future response events.  The logic developed is transferrable if other states want to implement the module, or FDOH can support data management efforts for interested states.  Automated data feeds to ESSENCE-FL removed resource intensive manual data collection, improved standardization of syndrome categorizations, increased access to these data by local, state, and federal epidemiologists in a timely manner, and expedited interpretation; enhancing situational awareness and guiding decision makers’ disease control efforts.