In November of 2011 BioSense 2.0 went live to provide tools for public health departments to process, store, and analyze meaningful use syndromic surveillance data. In February of 2012 ESSENCE was adapted to support meaningful use syndromic surveillance data and was installed on the Amazon GovCloud. Tarrant County Public Health Department agreed to pilot the ESSENCE system and evaluate its performance compared to a local version ESSENCE they currently used.

MUse will make EHR data increasingly available for public health surveillance. For Stage 2, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulations will require hospitals and offer an option for eligible professionals to provide electronic syndromic surveillance data to public health. Together, these data can strengthen public health surveillance capabilities and population health outcomes (Figure 1). To facilitate the adoption and effective use of these data to advance population health, public health priorities and system capabilities must shape standards for data exchange.

The BioSense program’s mission is to support and improve public health surveillance infrastructure and human capacity required to monitor (with minimal lag) critical population health indicators of the scope and severity of acute health threats to the public health; and support national, state, and local responses to those threats.