This transcript is auto-generated and may contain inaccuracies.

LeighAnna Bennett:
This poster is titled, “Improving Missouri’s Essence System to Support Data Modernization and Interoperability,” by LeighAnna Bennett and Faye Wu from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Missouri must collect Syndromic Surveillance Data to track illness and injury trends, identify outbreaks, and assess public health measures. An upgraded system was needed to enhance data quality and completeness, as current data did not meet the CDC National Syndromic Surveillance Program or NSSP standards. The state is working to improve its local instance of the Electronic Surveillance System for the early notification of community-based epidemics (Essence) to align with the Public Health Accreditation Board’s requirements.

Modernizing data and ensuring interoperability are essential for quicker and more effective public health response methods. Missouri partnered with Inductive Health to provide hosting maintenance and operational support, which included upgrading Missouri’s local essence system during the onboarding process. Inductive Health is utilizing its nationally recognized methodology to ensure high-throughput feed integration and high-quality data exchange among public health agencies to improve data processing. In essence, inductive health is now greatly assisting in the validation of HL7 messages to ensure quality data isbeing ingested into the new local system and, in turn, sent on to NSSP. Notable results include an increase in data fields collected from 60 in the old system to over 200 in the new system, with data completeness of between 95 to 100% for most fields. Data reporting, including priority one and two, data elements, improved significantly on the CDC NSSP platform, and most notably, the discharge diagnosis reporting field improved from around two to 3% completeness previously to over 70% completeness using the New Local Essence and NSSP platforms. There are now additional ready-to-use queries in the chief complaint and discharge diagnosis categories, more secure and efficient user management, and new data sources, such as air quality and weather data, integrated into the system to identify potential outbreaks or health events linked to environmental conditions.

In conclusion, Missouri has enhanced its local essence system for better syndromic surveillance, improving data collection, quality, and analysis. This modernization allows for efficient monitoring of outbreaks and public health threats while meeting NSSP data submission requirements. Refinement of data sources and methods is ongoing with support from Inductive Health for User Management Facility Onboarding and Data Quality. The upgraded system will help maintain PHAB accreditation and improve population health in Missouri. With the implementation of the new Missouri local essence system, three objectives have been identified as the next steps for the project. These focus on the overall goal of increasing public health capacity with the new system; the Missouri essence team can work towards expanding and integrating new local data sources, advancing analysis of syndromic surveillance data, and increasing collaboration with local and state public health partners. To end, we would like to acknowledge our partnership with the team at Inductive Health Informatics, thanking them for the efforts taken to improve Missouri’s Local Essence System and data submission to NSSP.