2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

Community Engagement among the BioSense 2.0 User 
Group
Stacey Hoferka*1, Marcus Rennick2, Erin E. Austin3, Anne Burke4, Rosa Ergas5, Jay 
Fiedler6, Laura Streichert7 and Amanda Wahnich3

1IL Dept Public Health, Chicago, IL, USA; 2ASTHO, Arlington, VA, USA; 3Virginia Dept. of Health, Richmond, VA, USA; 4Utah Dept. of 
Health, Salt Lake City, UT, USA; 5Mass. Dept. of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; 6Michigan Dept. of Community Health, Lansing, MI, 
USA; 7ISDS, Brighton, MA, USA

Objective
This roundtable will provide a forum for the syndromic 

surveillance Community of Practice (CoP) to learn about activities 
of the BioSense 2.0 User Group (BUG) workgroups that address 
priority issues in syndromic surveillance. It will be an opportunity 
to discuss key challenges faced by public health jurisdictions in the 
era of Meaningful Use and identify further needs and best practices 
in the areas of data quality, data sharing, onboarding, and developing 
syndrome definitions.

Introduction
BioSense 2.0 has become a platform for technical receipt and 

analysis of syndromic surveillance data for many jurisdictions 
nationwide, as well as a collaborative effort that has engaged a larger 
community of syndromic surveillance practitioners, Governance 
Group, and federal agencies and organizations. The potential long-
term benefits of BioSense 2.0 for resource and data sharing have at 
times been overshadowed by the short-term limitations of the system 
and disconnected efforts among the CoP. In May 2014, representatives 
from 41 jurisdictions attended a 2-day, in-person meeting where four 
workgroups were formed to address on-boarding, data quality, data 
sharing and syndrome definition in an effort to advance changes that 
resonate with actual surveillance practice.

Description
Representatives from each workgroup will describe their efforts 

to date and engage the CoP in the discussion. The goals of the 
workgroups are to coordinate efforts nationwide, better inform 
development of BioSense 2.0 to the Governance Group and CDC, 
and achieve high-quality outcomes for the practice of syndromic 
surveillance. As Figure 1 illustrates, the BioSense 2.0 workgroups 
create a cooperative environment to address complex system-wide 
concerns. The workgroups’ focuses are described as follows:

Data quality workgroup aims to document data processing steps, 
develop tools to assess data in BioSense 2.0, and determine best 
practices for addressing data quality deficiencies. Working toward 
these aims will give jurisdictions the ability to understand, measure, 
and improve their data, resulting in increased comparability, utility 
and trust of data housed in the BioSense 2.0 application and output 
derived from these data.

Data sharing workgroup is rooted in the fundamental desire to 
leverage cloud based data storage of the BioSense 2.0 architecture 
toward enhanced data sharing within and between jurisdictions and 
system participants. The two primary initiatives of this group are to 
specify data sharing roles and permissions for users in the system and 
to evaluate the need for Data Use Agreements between jurisdictions 
to facilitate data sharing activities.

On-boarding workgroup aims to create processes for and 
implement documentation of on-boarding standards and contextualize 
these data through creation of jurisdictional profiles. These efforts 
will help to define functionality for automated structural message 

conformance and content, ensure compliance to implementation 
guides, and describe best practices through a reference mapping 
process.

Syndrome definition workgroup aims to standardize the 
syndrome definitions available in BioSense 2.0 and determine the 
best processes for syndrome binning. Working towards these aims 
will ensure that data are accurately parsed and searchable, resulting 
in comparability across jurisdictions.

Audience Engagement
Activities from each of the four workgroups will be presented to 

the audience. Current status, planned development, and functionality 
requests to the CDC will be identified.Participants will be asked to 
comment on benefits and additional needs that would improve the 
current work. Each workgroup will spend five minutes presenting a 
tool or solution and then invite open discussion with the audience. 
The end result of the roundtable will be a list of functionality and 
enhancement requirements to be considered in the workgroups’ on-
going efforts. Recruitment of additional workgroup participants will 
also occur.

Figure 1. BioSense 2.0 User Group Community of Practice Workgroups

Keywords
BioSense 2.0; Workgroups; Community of Practice; Syndromic 
Surveillance

*Stacey Hoferka
E-mail: stacey.hoferka@illinois.gov    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e184, 201