State and Local Support - Cooperative Agreement

The National Syndromic Surveillance Program’s (NSSP) BioSense Platform offers state and local health departments critical new surveillance resources at no cost. NSSP is spending smarter by replacing out-of-date technology services with a secure Internet cloud. The cloud-based BioSense Platform provides a distributed environment, which means the software applications and tools are standardized and data can be exchanged easily. The BioSense Platform provides users secure data storage space and the tools they need to conduct syndromic surveillance and analyze information.

The CDC cooperative agreement, “BioSense 2.0: Building State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Surveillance Capacity to Enhance Regional and National All-Hazards Public Health Situation Awareness,” funds and supports state, local, and national health authorities that use the BioSense Platform to improve public health situation awareness and syndromic surveillance. In 2015, about $6.7 million was awarded to 31 grantees through a cooperative agreement to

• promote timely exchange of electronic health-related information between healthcare providers and public health authorities;
• facilitate timely information sharing among state, local, and national public health partners; and
• improve the science, analytic, and workforce practice of public health surveillance programs at local, state, and national levels.