BACKGROUND: Syndromic surveillance (SyS) employs hospital emergency department data and other non-traditional data sources to detect early events, monitor disease trends, and conduct situational awareness during public events. The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) has access to two SyS systems: the Cook County Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community Based Epidemics (ESSENCE) managed by Cook County Department of Public Health, and the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) with Illinois data managed by Illinois Department of Public Health. While some CDPH programs have routinely used SyS in disease surveillance, such as monitoring influenza-like illness, the utility and usefulness of SyS in other programs remained unknown. The objectives of this project were to explore the use of SyS and enhance CDPH’s capacity in utilizing SyS.
METHODS: The CDPH informatics project team met regularly to practice queries and discuss query testing results. Fact-finding sessions were held with CDPH programs to understand their current knowledge and use of SyS, provide an overview of SyS and the project objectives. As a Project SHINE (Strengthening Health Systems through Interprofessional Education) demonstration site, the project team convened a meeting facilitated by National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) representatives. To engage programs across CDPH, the project team invited representatives from programs to attend visioning and fact-finding sessions led by NACCHO.
RESULTS: The fact-finding sessions revealed that the current understanding and usage of SyS varied across CDPH. A few programs expressed an interest in exploring SyS to enhance their surveillance activities. The project team subsequently followed up with these programs to understand their needs, gather requirements and define the syndromes of interest. The team then generated a list of syndromes; developed, tested, refined and implemented queries to monitor syndromes; interpreted and summarized monitoring results; and distributed the results back to the programs. The project team applied this methodology to conduct situational awareness during public events at the request of the Emergency Preparedness Program; monitored violence related emergency room visits for the Office of Violence Prevention; and provided the CDPH leadership team with information to assist with rumor control.
CONCLUSIONS: CDPH programs expressed interest in exploring the use of SyS, specifically in non-traditional surveillance areas where there is a lack of timely surveillance data. The next steps include continuing to engage with interested programs, refining existing queries to monitor disease trends over time, and developing new queries to aid in CDPH’s public health actions.