Information system architecture for global epidemiological surveillance

Authors

Abstract

Diseases like avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jacob syndrome represent a new era of biological threats. Nowadays, biological hazards are breeding, mutating and evolving at tremendous speed. Furthermore, they may spread out at the same speed as which we travel. This reveals an urgent need for an agent capable of dealing with such threats. This paper presents the architecture for an effective information system infrastructure enabling near real-time detection of disease outbreaks, fulfilling that need, using knowledge extraction algorithms to explore a symptoms/diseases data warehouse. To collect such data, we take advantage of the Internet and common personal communication devices. We also present a case-simulation proving the system can detect an outbreak within hours or even minutes of its physical occurrence, alerting health decision makers and providing quick interaction and feedback between them and medical staff. The architecture is also scalable and functional independently from its geographical dimension.

Keywords

Healthcare Information Systems, Epidemic Surveillance

Subject

Healthcare Information Systems

Conference

EHMA 2005 (European Health Management Association) Annual Conference, June 2005