The Palm Beach County Health Department and the Healthcare Emergency Response Coalition of Palm Beach County (HERC) recently presented Boca Raton Community Hospital (BRCH) with a Leadership Award for being the first hospital in Palm Beach County to implement the ESSENCE syndromic surveillance system.
On a daily basis, 11 Palm Beach County hospitals, including BRCH, automatically transmit de-identified electronic emergency department chief complaint data to the Palm Beach County Health Department. Data elements in the data file include patient age, chief complaint, time of visit, race/ethnicity, discharge disposition (e.g. admitted, discharged, etc), zip code and hospital name. Each chief complaint is then placed into one of 12 syndrome categories using the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), a data management and analysis system developed by Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. ESSENCE performs automatic data analysis, establishing a baseline with a 28-day average. Daily case data is then analyzed against this baseline to identify statistically significant increases. A yellow flag indicates a warning and a red flag indicates an alert. Each day, a Palm Beach County Health Department analyst evaluates all alerts to determine if further investigation is warranted. At BRCH, the ESSENCE program has been live for almost two years. Implementation of the system was spearheaded by Dianne Patterson, SM (ASCP), CIC, BRCHs director of infection control.
