Epidemiologic surveillance is the ongoing and systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health data in the process of describing and monitoring a health event. This information is used for planning, implementing, and evaluating public health interventions and programs. Surveillance data are used both to determine the need for public health action and to assess the effectiveness of ...

Surveillance, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “is the cornerstone of public health security” [1]. In many developing countries, human, laboratory, and infrastructure limitations impede effective surveillance [2–5]. Such countries likely do not meet core surveillance and response capacities under the new International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) [6], which require detection o...

BACKGROUND Many systems for routine public health surveillance rely on centralized collection of potentially identifiable, individual, identifiable personal health information (PHI) records. Although individual, identifiable patient records are essential for conditions for which there is mandated reporting, such as tuberculosis or sexually transmitted diseases, they are not routinely required f...

Ping Yan, Hsinchun Chen, and Daniel Zeng Department of Management Information Systems University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona [email protected]; {hchen, zeng}@eller.arizona.edu

Public health agencies often require data that address the needs of special populations, such as minority groups. Sources of surveillance data often contain insufficient numbers of subjects to fully inform health agencies. In this review, we address the problems of and potential approaches for situations with insufficient surveillance data. We use the examples of race and ethnic minority groups...

In recent years with increasing population and changing climatic conditions over the globe gave room to outbreak of different diseases, proper and timely handling of disease cases can result in saving many important human lives. Public health surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data regarding a health-related event for use in public ...

Microblog services such as Twitter are an attractive source of data for public health surveillance, as they avoid the legal and technical obstacles to accessing the more obvious and targeted sources of health information. Only a tiny fraction of tweets may contain useful public health information but in Twitter this is offset by the sheer volume of tweets posted. We present a system which can i...

Introduction Traditionally, public health surveillance departments collect, analyze, interpret, and package information into static surveillance reports for distribution to stakeholders. This resource-intensive production and dissemination process has major shortcomings that impede end users from optimally utilizing this information for public health action. Often, by the time traditional repor...