Technical Tips and Training

Welcome to the NSSP Technical Tips page, where you’ll find helpful tips, tricks, and training for working with BioSense Platform tools such as ESSENCE, Access & Management Center, and RStudio Workbench.

NSSP-ESSENCE

• Free-text Coding Article Series—how to write ESSENCE free-text queries:
• • Part 1. Wildcards
  • Part 2. Underscores_and Brackets [ ]
  • Part 3. Inclusionary Terms
  • Part 4. Exclusion Terms and Parentheses
  • Part 5. A “Starter” Fall-related Injury Query and Examples of Complex Queries
  • Part 6. Wrapping Things Up
  • Part 7. Additional Tips: ISBLANK and ISNULL

• ESSENCE Online Training
  Six self-paced modules instruct and assess your understanding of concepts being presented. Topics include overviews of ESSENCE, syndromic surveillance, basic and advanced ESSENCE system components, ESSENCE Chief Complaint Processor, and ESSENCE alerting algorithms. Learn how to perform routine tasks such as create queries and analyze data using multiple visualization types.
• ESSENCE Training on Using Queries, webinar led by Wayne Loschen of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
• NSSP ESSENCE Training at PHI Conference [PDF]

Query Development

• Query Development: Community and Technical Resources (Job Aid)
• Getting Started with Drowning and Submersion Syndrome Definitions
• How to Do Queries in RStudio Workbench
• How to Do SQL Queries Using SAS Studio

RStudio

• How to Use the ESSENCE APIs With the Rnssp Package
  This document explains how to load Rnssp and use it to access ESSENCE APIs. The document provides the code for using seven APIs (time series data table, time series png image, table builder results, data details [line level], summary stats, alert list detection table, and time series data table with stratified historical alerts/ESSENCE2).
• How to Do Queries in RStudio Workbench
• Sharing a Project in RStudio (on the new server)

SAS Studio

• How to Do SQL Queries Using SAS Studio