Syndromic Surveillance Data → NSSP Data Sources

NSSP Data Sources

Last Updated: March 2022

NSSP ESSENCE receives data from:

Emergency department visits
Urgent and ambulatory care centers

Laboratory test and result data
Inpatient healthcare settings

Current Non-Federal NSSP Emergency Facility Participation Map: This map shows county-level participation (i.e., counties with at least one participating facility) in NSSP.

Data Dictionary: Data Elements Used in NSSP Data Processing Journey : This handout provides an easy-to-understand description of the NSSP Data Dictionary and the data processing journey, including data processing steps, tables, and data elements.

Laboratory Data

NSSP ESSENCE now houses data from commercial labs. Laboratory data are sent at time of order, and all result types (including positive and negative results) are included. Data are identified by specimen, and while patient demographics are available, no unique patient identifiers are available in ESSENCE at this time. Laboratory data are available from early 2019.

Laboratory data include all testing for any reportable disease in the United States. NSSP also receives data on specific drugs of abuse from the lab, including, but not limited to, opioids, fentanyl, cocaine, amphetamines and methamphetamines, benzodiazepines, and cannabinoids.

Laboratory data are sorted into categories in ESSENCE, like sorting emergency department data into keyword syndromes. Use these categories to quickly find laboratory tests or results for a specific pathogen, chemical, or other area of interest, such as opioid tests. Laboratory data can most easily be accessed via the Laboratory by Results view.

Laboratory User Tables: This file includes three tables: an analytic data dictionary and lookup tables for the laboratory test categorizations and laboratory result categorizations.

Commercial Lab Data Dictionary: This dictionary includes data elements and processing rules for six commercial (anonymized) laboratories.

Mortality Data

NSSP–ESSENCE can now incorporate electronic mortality data. Mortality data can be combined with other health-related data for enhanced surveillance and response to public health threats and events. A noteworthy feature is the inclusion of both literal cause of death fields and ICD-10-CM codes. The literal cause of death fields provide the free text cause of death recorded on the death certificate at time of death. Like the “chief complaint” field within emergency department data, these fields can be queried to learn details about the health event of interest beyond final coded results. Analysts can query comprehensive cause of death data—from literal fields to final ICD-10 codes—to support surveillance activities, thereby improving situational awareness and response.

Additional NSSP/ESSENCE Resources can be found in the Resources section of this toolkit.

Syndromic Surveillance Data

State Syndromic Surveillance Systems

Toolkit Resources

Glossary