Technical Updates

Updates and Enhancements

Mortality Data Update

NSSP’s use of mortality data is still in its infancy. NSSP health scientists are doing preliminary analyses such as comparing trends of health conditions (using ICD-10 codes only) with multiple data sources to get insight into how NSSP data compare with other mortality data sources. They are also looking at the timeliness of key fields (ICD-10 code and Literal Cause of Death) to understand when these fields are populated and the death records finalized.

Currently, six public health jurisdictions actively submit mortality data. Site personnel in these jurisdictions can view their mortality data in the Daily Site Processing Summary Reports. The reports for sites that do not submit data will include this section with a note that mortality data have not been received.

To learn more about onboarding your site’s mortality data, please contact NSSP at nssp@cdc.gov for assistance.

Publication Updates

A number of quick start guides and user manuals are in review. We anticipate that these will be published late June or early July.

AMC Operations and Maintenance Release Scheduled for June

The Access & Management Center (AMC) update of June 23, 2022, includes back-end improvements to the database and bug fixes.

Notable changes:

• Data submission alerts for Batch Add have been resolved and now set the date to 7 days from the current date.
• White spaces before and after the Universal Unique Identifiers (UUID) value are now truncated to avoid processing issues.
• The title for Data Quality Dashboards in the NSSP Applications section of the AMC Home Page is now NSSP Dashboards & Visualizations.
• Table headers on the Master Facility Table (MFT) tab and MFT Review tab will lock in place and remain visible when scrolling through the facilities.
• Site-specific feeds are now displayed on the MFT tab’s feed filter.
• The following error message will be received if the Primary FacilityID_UUID and Facility Status fields are updated simultaneously:
  • “Primary FacilityID_UUID and Facility Status fields cannot be updated simultaneously. Please update the Primary FacilityID_UUID followed by Facility Status.”
• Private User Groups are no longer displayed in the All Public User Groups table.

Security Reminder: Check that NSSP Websites and Emails are Legitimate and Authorized

The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) has two core websites:

• NSSP Community of Practice website, sponsored by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE)
• NSSP website, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

These are the only public-facing NSSP Internet resources. However, several applications and analytic tools are available to authenticated users of both AMC and ESSENCE web applications (available on BioSense Platform). They generate outgoing emails with an @syndromicsurveillance.org return address.

The currently authorized sender addresses are:

• amc@syndromicsurveillance.org,
• biosenseplatform@syndromicsurveillance.org,
• dqadm@syndromicsurveillance.org,
• essence@syndromicsurveillance.org, and
• system@syndromicsurveillance.org.

NSSP will send some email directly from nssp@cdc.gov. But if you receive an email from other senders purporting to be an NSSP resource, please view the email as possible spam, spoofing, or phishing attempts. Please follow your information technology department guidelines for reporting junk or possibly malicious emails.