The National Syndromic Surveillance Program: Enhancing Syndromic Surveillance Capacity and Practice

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The mission of the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) is to promote the use of high quality syndromic surveillance data for improved nation-wide all-hazard situational awareness for public health decision-making and enhanced responses to hazardous events, and outbreaks. The purpose of this funding opportunity is to assist state and local public health authorities to implement syndromic surveillance to enhance situation awareness and detect and characterize disease outbreaks or other hazardous events or conditions of public health concern in order to respond quickly to local threats. In addition, this program provides support to state and local health authorities to advance the Meaningful Use of syndromic surveillance data from electronic health records (EHR). Activities that will be supported to enhance syndromic surveillance capacity and practice include (1) improving the overall representativeness of syndromic surveillance data by recruiting hospital or other sources of emergency department/urgent care or inpatient data that are representative of the jurisdiction’s population; (2) improving the quality, timeliness, utility, and sharing of these data; and (3) increasing collaboration among state and local jurisdictions through a National Syndromic Surveillance Community of Practice.

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