Shenzhen is a special economic region in southern China, adjacent to Hong Kong, with a population of approximately 14 million. The pioneering efforts of Shenzhen in the development of electronic disease surveillance started as early as in 1995. The setup of syndromic surveillance was started after the SARS outbreak in 2003, including surveillance in Fever Clinics, GI clinics, selected schools, and sentinel surveillance for the workers in selected chicken farms and bird markets. In 2007, a regional plan was developed for systematically integrating the surveillance for environmental health, food safety, lab information systems, infectious disease notification, and outbreak management.
Objective
This paper introduces the challenges and lessons learned from the planning and development of a regional integrated disease surveillance system, presenting a new method to quantitatively measure IT support capabilities in disease surveillance and control, as well as a collaboration model integrating the information from multiple sources.