As the coronavirus spreads across the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is teaming up with Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory to pull data from hospitals across the country into the government’s biosurveillance program.
APL’s Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics, or ESSENCE, was developed for the government’s biosurveillance program, which tracks key indicators from doctors and hospitals across the country to give researchers and officials a view into the spread of diseases.
APL’s ESSENCE is the "primary syndromic surveillance tool” for CDC's BioSense platform. It provides the raw data that is then filtered through BioSense’s other applications, which include research, analytic and visualization tools.
The ESSENCE application itself is “a data-agnostic tool that can process any data that contains a date and something you want to count,” Sheri Lewis, manager of APL’s Health Protection and Assurance program area, told Nextgov in an email Monday.
“There are many goals for many different users. Public health users at the CDC, state and local levels use the data for situational awareness of the current disease burden in their communities, as well as early event detection, and numerous analytics to help understand ongoing situations—like COVID-19,” she said. “It is often used for population-based surveillance more so than individual surveillance. Understanding the potential spread of a disease, understanding the results of interventions, understanding current trends in a timely fashion before finalized ‘gold-standard’ datasets are available are all things for which the system is used.”
In this case, pandemic looks upgrade biosurveillance database
