New OHA data dashboard shows emergency visits for common summer hazards

PORTLAND, Ore. (KTVZ) – Oregon Health Authority has launched a new, interactive data dashboard that will allow people to monitor trends in the most common summer-related hazards.

The Oregon ESSENCE Summer Hazard Report dashboard was launched last week by OHA’s Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention Section.

It contains interactive graphs showing total daily counts of emergency department and urgent care center visits in Oregon associated with four injury and illness categories: heat-related illness, water submersion events, wildfire-related smoke inhalation, and air quality-related respiratory illness.

“Injuries such as heat-related illness and smoke-related respiratory distress are, unfortunately, all too common now as climate change-related threats have become the new reality in Oregon,” said Tom Jeanne, M.D., M.P.H., deputy state health officer and epidemiologist at OHA. “We need to monitor ESSENCE data so we can anticipate when and where resources will be needed to help us adapt to these events.”

The summer hazards dashboard allows users to hover over a section of the interactive graphs in each category to view the number of emergency department or urgent care clinic visits by date in a given year. Users can also select data sets by year, going to back to 2018. The dashboard page under each tab also contains a description of the injury or illness, the groups most at risk, and how it can be treated or prevented.

The data come from reports to the Oregon ESSENCE database. ESSENCE – Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics – provides real-time data for public health and hospitals to monitor what is happening in emergency departments across the state before, during and after a public health emergency.

The dashboard will be updated weekly through the summer.