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Syndromic Surveillance

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-real time 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

Promoting Interoperability

Syndromic surveillance user resources

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.