*If you have questions about the NSSP CoP, its highly collaborative user groups, the NSSP CoP Slack Workspace (a collaboration platform), or syndromic surveillance, please email syndromic@cste.org.

Community Highlights

NSSP Community of Practice Monthly Call

Happy New Year! Let’s start the year by sharing some good news. Despite the unprecedented challenges of 2020 and 2021, we advanced syndromic surveillance in ways that will have far-reaching impact on the future of public health surveillance.

We attribute this to having a well-established Community of Practice (CoP), one that has been honing its collaborative skills for years. The essential tools, workflows, and relationships for conducting syndromic surveillance were intact at the onset of the pandemic, easing our ability to unify response efforts.

For starters, our response to COVID-19 has helped us do the following:

• Expand emergency department (ED) coverage to all 50 states and Guam. In 2022, we want to increase facility participation to provide more coverage within public health jurisdictions.
• Rapidly respond to questions from senators and White House staff, produce a data summary for the CDC Director, and issue weekly reports on both pediatric ED visits and trends by race and ethnicity.
• Pioneer analytics that serve as leading-edge indicators of COVID-19 transmission.
• Develop an innovative method that monitors trends in the number of counties with a statistical increase in COVID-19 ED visits.

Our real-time surveillance for COVID-19 demonstrated to those outside public health the potential of syndromic surveillance. And as the term syndromic surveillance began appearing in mainstream articles, the media helped to educate the public by describing the fundamentals of how this surveillance works to capture near real-time data. The media also brought long-overdue attention to our fractured public health system, exposing limitations in funding, staffing, and infrastructure.

What we’ve learned in our quest to understand, monitor, and combat the spread of COVID-19 has been applied to other endeavors. In 2021, the NSSP team and community collaborated to accomplish the following:

• Expand the use of analytic tools that control for changes in facilities sending data over time, increasing confidence in longer term trend data.
• Develop the Rnssp package and associated report templates to support partners with code and analytic tools.
• Use ED data in novel ways for vaccine safety. We found that by using a query to capture vaccine-associated adverse events in ED visits, NSSP could produce a weekly interactive report for the CDC team overseeing vaccine safety. This report helped the team rapidly respond to questions about long-term ED trends in health conditions including myocarditis and thrombosis.
• Complete the categorization of commercial laboratory data, enabling rapid analysis of all health conditions reportable in any state.
• Enable public health practitioners to search ED data by Clinical Classifications Software Refined (CCSR) and ICD-10 diagnostic categories.

In 2021, the NSSP team published more articles than in all previous years of the program’s existence combined. As cases of COVID-19 surged, we published national trends on the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including pediatric visits during high transmission of the delta variant. At the same time, we published on suicide attempt, mental health, violence, overdose, influenza and other respiratory infections, and Lyme disease. We also used data from ED visits to publish on heat-related illness following the 2021 heat wave.

Overall, our near real-time data help to meet our nation’s need for timely and reliable data. And, importantly, we are making these data available to people outside public health through innovative public-facing dashboards and by providing national- and regional-level data to researchers and academia.

In 2022, the NSSP CoP aims to build on past achievements and leverage syndromic surveillance in new ways. As in previous years, we’ll do this by working together to host high-quality conferences and trainings and by focusing NSSP CoP subcommittee projects on pressing issues that will benefit from the diverse perspectives and expertise provided by community members.

We urge you to be a part of this progress: Join a subcommittee. Attend presentations. Once you’re involved, you’ll quickly benefit from the wisdom of others. You’ll discover novel approaches, new technologies, lessons learned, value gained from mutual support, and access to expert opinions. So please take advantage of the educational opportunities and social networking available. We look forward to your involvement in 2022!

Announcements

• New Date and Time for Monthly Community of Practice Call
  • Beginning January 2022, our monthly NSSP CoP calls will be held the fourth Wednesday of the month at a NEW time: 12:00–1:30 PM ET. Please join our first call of the new year on Wednesday, January 26, 2022, at 12:00 PM ET.
  • Updates have been posted on the NSSP CoP calendar.
• NSSP CoP Members Invited to Participate in Collaboration to Improve Emergency Support for People with Disabilities
  
  • NSSP is collaborating with partners from CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) to address COVID-19 response gaps. This new collaborative project will involve developing, testing, and disseminating syndrome definitions that can identify people with disabilities. The goal is to build state and local health department capacity and better monitor the health and wellbeing of people with disabilities before, during, and after public health emergencies.
  • To accomplish this, the CoP will convene a scientific panel of experts in disability, clinical medicine, syndromic surveillance, and emergency preparedness and response to collaborate on the disability definition for the project and to finalize a list of diagnosis codes for the syndrome definitions.
  • NSSP Community of Practice members are invited to contribute to the effort. Participants will meet for up to five discussions (~1 hour) between February and July. Once this foundational work is done, members will be invited to test the definitions.
  • Representatives from NCBDDD and ASTHO gave an overview of the project and answered questions during a webinar held January 18, 2022. Information will be posted in the Knowledge Repository.
  • If you’re interested in participating or pilot testing the definitions, please email Cassandra Thompson (cthompson@astho.org).
• 2021 Syndromic Surveillance Symposium Final Event Packet Now Available
  • The event packet includes track-specific content annotated with recordings plus slides and submitted abstracts.
  • The event packet can be found in the Knowledge Repository’s 2021 Syndromic Surveillance Symposium entry.
• Mortality Project Final Webinar Recording Now Available
  • In 2021, NSSP and the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) collaborated with the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) on a pilot project to route mortality data into ESSENCE. Recently, CSTE hosted a webinar with NSSP and NAPHSIS colleagues to give an overview of the project, including a demonstration of the application programming interface developed.
  • The webinar recording and other materials can be accessed in the Knowledge Repository.
• CSTE 2022 Annual Conference Scheduled for June 19–23, 2022; Louisville, Kentucky
  • The CSTE Annual Conference connects public health epidemiologists and surveillance practitioners from across the country. The conference includes workshops, plenary sessions, oral breakout sessions, roundtable discussions, and poster presentations.
  • At this time, CSTE is planning for the possibility of some 2022 conference sessions being held in person and others being held virtually. CSTE will monitor public health circumstances and make changes based on health recommendations for group gatherings.
  • The call for abstracts closed Thursday, January 6, 2022.
  • Accepted authors will be notified in March 2022.
• New Slack Channel Added
  New
  • A new channel, “#hospital-admissions,” has been added.
  • This channel serves as a space for members to discuss data quality and trends in hospital admission data, which are particularly timely for Omicron.