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ESSENCE II and the framework for evaluating syndromic surveillance systems
Joseph S Lombardo1, H Burkom, J Pavlin
1Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd, Laurel, MD 20723, USA. Joe.Lombardo@jhuapl.edu
Introduction:
The Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE II) is a prototype syndromic surveillance system for capturing and analyzing public health indicators for early detection of disease outbreaks.
Objectives:
This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of ESSENCE II according to a CDC framework for evaluating syndromic surveillance systems.
Methods:
Each major topic of the framework is addressed in this assessment of ESSENCE II performance.
Results:
ESSENCE captures data in multiple formats, parses text strings into syndrome groupings, and applies multiple temporal and spatio-temporal outbreak-detection algorithms. During a recent DARPA evaluation exercise, ESSENCE algorithms detected a set of health events with a median delay of 1 day after the earliest possible detection opportunity.
Conclusions:
ESSENCE II has provided excellent performance with respect to the framework and has proven to be a useful and cost-effective approach for providing early detection of health events.
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