Integrating Poison Center Data into Oregon ESSENCE using a Low-Cost Solution

Introduction Oregon Public Health Division (OPHD), in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, implemented Oregon ESSENCE in 2012. Oregon ESSENCE is an automated, electronic syndromic surveillance system that captures emergency department data. To strengthen the capabilities of Oregon ESSENCE, OPHD sought other sources of health-outcome information, including Oregon Poison Center (OPC). In the past, Oregon’s surveillance staff manually monitored OPC data on the National Poison Data Service (NPDS) website. Although functional, it was not integrated into Oregon’s syndromic surveillance system and required epidemiologists to assess alerts on individual calls. To achieve data integration, OPHD pursued an automated solution to deliver OPC data into Oregon ESSENCE. OPHD’s growing interoperability infrastructure fostered development of a low-cost, reliable solution to automate the integration of these data sources.