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ISDS 2018 Conference Abstracts

Why You Should Participate in HHS (Health and 
Human Services) Regional Epi Groups
Michael Coletta*
CSELS/DHIS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA

Objective
Within the BioSense Platform, users have the ability to view HHS 

Region level data that can provide insight into what may be happening 
around the country. Epidemiologists can examine this information 
for changes in trends of subsyndromes or other potential issues of 
public health concern and compare it to their local data. However, 
the insight that regional data can provide is limited without better 
understanding of what is happening in the jurisdictions that make 
up the region. This round table will discuss the benefits of engaging 
with other jurisdictions within regions and attempt to define rules of 
engagement that can be used to facilitate interactions.

Introduction
One of the early successes for the National Syndromic Surveillance 

Program’s (NSSP’s) BioSense Platform was community agreement 
on what should make up national and regional picture of the data. For 
NSSP to meet program objectives, National level surveillance and 
situational awareness had to be made available – not just to CDC, 
but to the entire community. To make this possible, the community 
had to agree on a limited dataset that would be sufficient to produce 
national and regional picture. Currently when NSSP staff at CDC or 
a particular program review HHS Regional data, they can only see 
trends at high levels. Although, this information is proving useful, 
when very unusual data spikes occur there is insufficient information 
to determine its public health significance. CDC would like to set 
up HHS Regional Epi groups made up of syndromic surveillance 
practitioners within regions in order to communicate about potentially 
unusual findings and discuss implications for local jurisdictions.

Keywords
NSSP; HHS Regional Epidemiology Groups; National Surveillance; 
Regional Surveillance

*Michael Coletta
E-mail: mac0@cdc.gov

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 10(1):e199, 2018