Colorado’s Syndromic Surveillance Program
Syndromic surveillance is a timely system for detecting and monitoring public health conditions or events of concern. The system provides near-realtime emergency department data to public health officials for situational awareness and response during and after a health event or outbreak.
Colorado began participating in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) in 2013. In 2023, the program was officially moved to CDPHE. The Colorado Syndromic Surveillance Program uses data collected from hospitals, free standing emergency departments, and urgent cares to monitor public health concerns such as respiratory illnesses, heat-related illness, substance overdose, and more.
The Colorado SyS Program currently partners with the following public health agencies and facilities in their jurisdictions:
If your jurisdiction is not yet onboarded and you would like to learn more about participating in the program, email cdphe_sys@state.co.us.
Syndromic surveillance data in action
Technical Specifications
- NSSP Syndromic Data Element Prioritization
- PHIN Messaging Guide
- NSSP Onboarding
- NSSP Technical Publications and Standards
Promoting Interoperability
Syndromic surveillance user resources
- New to Syndromic Surveillance
- NSSP ESSENCE Training Course
- NSSP ESSENCE
- NSSP AMC
- NSSP Community of Practice Updates page (CDC)
- NSSP CoP Homepage
- NSSP Slack Request
Limitations of syndromic surveillance
The Colorado Syndromic Surveillance Program has been collecting timely syndromic surveillance data for situational awareness and enhanced response to hazardous events and disease outbreaks since 2013. Onboarded facilities are required to submit hourly data and all records must include both chief complaint and discharge diagnosis fields.
Syndromic surveillance, while timely and thorough, is updated on an hourly basis. Therefore, this data is preliminary.
The syndromic surveillance ESSENCE system employs search tools to identify cases based on their free text fields (chief complaint and triage notes) and/or discharge diagnosis codes (ICD-10). Chief complaints are not diagnoses, and the free text fields may contain spelling errors or abbreviations.
Additionally, syndromic surveillance data presented typically reflect non-fatal hospital visits (emergency department and some inpatient), and some patients may be counted multiple times (for multiple visits) over the analysis period. Syndromic surveillance data are not a representative sample of the population and are not intended to characterize the true burden of the selected health indicators in the community.