Biosurveillance is the process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information that might relate to disease activity and threats to human, animal and plant health.

Unveiled in 2003, the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics supports force health protection by collecting near real-time health data for Military Health System beneficiaries globally. Millions of outpatient medical encounter records and laboratory results can be systematically queried to detect health events of interest, including infectious diseases, injuries, mental illness, and diseases due to environmental exposures (e.g., contaminants, CBRN). The system has built-in algorithms to automatically detect increases in health events of potential public health significance to support the timely initiation of public health investigation of outbreaks. ESSENCE support the MHS Force Health Protection mission to maintain readiness by providing situational awareness and supporting informed public health decision-making and interventions against public health threats. ESSENCE is hosted by the Enterprise Intelligence & Data Solutions.

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division, the service-specific force health protection commands, and medical treatment facilities worldwide use ESSENCE to do the following:

• Conduct syndromic surveillance to detect public health threats prior to laboratory diagnosis.
• Monitor trends in various health events of public health interest.
• Create dashboards that facilitate rapid review of data for health events of interest.
• Detect outbreaks early by reviewing automated data alerts for increases that may indicate the need to initiate a public health investigation.
• Access five years of historical clinical and epidemiologic data for MHS beneficiaries.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of control measures during outbreaks or health events overall by displaying data trends over time.
• Develop custom queries for health events of interest within minutes.
• Enhance case finding for health events, including diseases that may not be well-described.
• Generate visualizations and data tables that summarize trends for specific health events that can be included in reports and communications.

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