Essence – also known as the Electronic Surveillance system for the early notification of Community based Epidemics – is the web based platform that hosts Texas Syndromic surveillance data. ESSENCE collects, processes, and analyzes TxS2 data sources for use by analysts and epidemiologists. Regardless of the data source, the underlying data can be queried, analyzed, and visualized both temporally and spatially by the end user, using data-specific fields.