Taiwan had established a nation-wide emergency department (ED)-based syndromic surveillance system since 2004, with a mean detection sensitivity of 0.67 in 2004-06 [1]. However, this system may not represent the true epidemic situation of infectious disease in community, particularly those who don't seek medical care [2]. Moreover, the epidemiological settings, sources of the infection and social network all together may still facilitate the transmissions. These rooted problems cannot be rapidly solved.
Objective
This study has two specific aims:
(1) to establish a web-based, public-access infectious disease reporting system (www.eid.url.tw), using newly designed public syndrome groups and based on computational and participatory epidemiology
(2) to evaluate this system by comparing the epidemiological patterns with national-wide electronic health-database and traditional passive surveillance systems from Taiwan-CDC.