Commonly used syndromic surveillance methods based on the spatial scan statistic first classify disease cases into broad, pre-existing symptom categories ("prodromes") such as respiratory or fever, then detect spatial clusters where the recent case count of some prodrome is unexpectedly high. Novel emerging infections may have very specific and anomalous symptoms which should be easy to detect even if the number of cases is small. However, typical spatial scan approaches may fail to detect a novel outbreak if the resulting cases are not classified to any known prodrome.

PyConTextKit is a web-based platform that extracts entities from clinical text and provides relevant metadata - for example, whether the entity is negated or hypothetical - using simple lexical clues occurring in the window of text surrounding the entity. The system provides a flexible framework for clinical text mining, which in turn expedites the development of new resources and simplifies the resulting analysis process.

An expanded ambulatory health record, the Comprehensive Ambulatory Patient Encounter Record (CAPER) will provide multiple types of data for use in DoD ESSENCE. A new type of data not previously available is the Reason for Visit (ROV), a free-text field analogous to the Chief Complaint (CC). Intake personnel ask patients why they have come to the clinic and record their responses. Traditionally, the text should reflect the patient's actual statement. In reality the staff often "translates" the statement and adds jargon. Text parsing maps key words or phrases to specific syndromes.