Inpatient data provide robust and valuable information for VA beyond what was previously available in outpatient ESSENCE data or through manual methods. Inpatient data can be monitored year-round, which provides more complete situational awareness for planning and response. Future plans include (1) developing inpatient-specific alerting algorithms, (2) establishing a single VA ESSENCE application that combines both outpatient and inpatient data and (3) imsproving timeliness of inpatient data receipt and adding additional data elements to improve system specificity. 