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 Professional.

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
- ESSENCE Online Trainingexternal icon
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 Queriesexternal icon, webinar led by Wayne Loschen of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
- NSSP ESSENCE Training at PHI Conference pdf icon[PDF]
- How to Use the ESSENCE APIs With the Rnssp Packageexternal icon
Introduces the application programming interfaces (APIs) in ESSENCE and explains how to access them via the Rnssp package. Includes code for installing Rnssp, loading the packages, and using seven ESSENCE APIs.
RStudio
- How to Use RStudio with ESSENCE APIsexternal icon
Describes ESSENCE application programming interfaces (APIs) and how to access through RStudio. The Rnssp package is introduced (with examples of code) as a method to securely save Access & Mangement Center (AMC) credentials and interact with ESSENCE APIs. -
How to Use the ESSENCE APIs With the Rnssp Packageexternal icon
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 Pro
- Sharing a Project in RStudio (on the new server)
