Informatics Critical to Public Health Surveillance

Public health surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data regarding a health-related event for use in public health action to reduce morbidity and mortality and to improve health¹ by effective response management and coordination. As new pressures for early detection of disease outbreaks have arisen, particularly for outbreaks of possible bioterrorism (BT) origin, and as electronic health data have become increasingly available, so has the demand for public health situation awareness systems Although these systems are valuable for early warning of public health emergencies, there remains the cost of developing and managing such large and complex systems and of investigating inevitable false alarms. Whether these systems are dependable and cost effective enough and can demonstrate a significant and indispensable role in detection or prevention of mass casualty events of BT origin remains to be proven. This article will focus on the complexities of design, analysis, implementation and evaluation of public health surveillance and situation awareness systems and, in some cases, will discuss the key technologies being studied in Center for Biosecurity Informatics Research at University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston.