The Centre for Health Protection in Hong Kong has operated a sentinel surveillance system for infectious diseases at child care centre (CCC) since March 2004, among its multi-faceted disease surveillance systems. Forty-six CCCs have participated in the system and are contributing data weekly on absenteeism and common infectious disease symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and cough. The system was originally driven by a manual data collection mechanism via fax, followed by secondary data input and subsequent analysis. However, such mechanism might sometimes result in delayed data transmission and data loss. As an alternative to accommodate these limitations, a web-based platform is developed to increase the timeliness of data submission by the sentinel CCCs. The new platform not only speeds up data collection and eliminates the need for human data entry, but at the same time delivers summary statistics directly on the web through computer programmes on a real time basis, as soon as data is entered by the provider.
Objective
This paper describes the attempt to develop an internet-based community surveillance network to enhance timeliness and sensitivity in detecting community-wide infectious disease outbreaks among young children at CCCs in Hong Kong.