The need to evaluate biosurveillance data within a local, realworld context is necessary to maximize situational awareness at the community level given that: emergencies begin and end as local events, hospital emergency department demographic catchments may vary significantly within a county and some emergency department capabilities may be unique to particular hospitals. With the addition of data analysis methods, which produce intuitive summary visualizations of large data sets, it is hoped that individuals whose training is not as specialized as the EpiCenter TM users will gain a greater understanding of the biosurveillance data and its relevance to the local population.