Understanding your data is a fundamental pillar of disease surveillance success. With the increase in automated, electronic surveillance tools many public health users have begun to rely on those tools to produce reports that contain processed results to perform their daily jobs. These tools can focus on the algorithm or visualizations needed to produce the report, and can easily overlook the quality of the incoming data. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is often used to describe the value of reports when the incoming data is not of high quality.

The International Society for Disease Surveillance held its eleventh annual conference in San Diego on December 4th and 5th, 2012, under the theme Expanding Collaborations to Chart a New Course in Public Health Surveillance.  During these two days, practitioners and researchers across many disciplines gathered to share best practices, lessons learned and cutting edge approaches to timely disease surveillance.  A record number of abstracts were received, reviewed and presented – the schedule included 99 orals, 4 panels, 94 posters, 5 roundtables and 12 system demonstrations.  Presenters repr

Hospital emergency departments in Cook and surrounding counties currently send data to the Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) instance of ESSENCE on CCDPH servers. The cloud instance of ESSENCE has been enhanced to receive and export all meaningful use data elements in the meaningful use format. The NATO summit provided the opportunity for a demonstration project to assess the ability of an Amazon GovCloud instance of ESSENCE to ingest and process meaningful use data, and to export meaningful use surveillance data to the Cook County Locker in BioSense 2.0.