The ability to provide real time syndromic surveillance throughout the Capital Health Region is currently undeveloped. There are limited mechanisms for routine real time surveillance of disease or conditions of public health interest, e.g. communicable diseases, toxic exposure or injury. Toxic exposure and injury while preventable are not notifiable in Alberta and as a consequence there is no real-time surveillance system to identify burden of disease or opportunities for intervention. The notifiable disease system is reliant on paper-based forms which are slow, prone to human error, and labor intensive to convert to electronic database format for flexible analysis and interpretation. Finally there is no system to link the data collected on the same individual in each database without compromising confidentiality. ARTSSN is designed to remedy these deficiencies.
Objective
In this presentation we describe the creation of an IT architecture and infrastructure to integrate data from four sources to support real-time syndromic surveillance for injuries, toxic exposures and notifiable diseases in Capital Health, Alberta, Canada.