Application Development

To meet the long-term needs of public health and social development of China, it is in urgency to establish a comprehensive response system and crisis management mechanism for public health emergencies. Syndromic surveillance system has great advantages in promoting early detection of epidemics and reducing the burden of disease outbreak confirmation. The effective method to set up the syndromic surveillance system is to modify existing case report system, improve the organizational structures and integrate new function with the traditional system.

Objective

To understand the structure and capacity of current infection disease surveillance system, and to provide baseline information for developing syndromic surveillance system in rural China.

There is growing recognition that an inability to access timely health indicators can hamper both the design and the effective implementation of infectious diseases control interventions. In malaria control, the global use of standard interventions has driven down the burden of disease in many regions. Further gains in high transmission areas and elimination in lower transmission settings, however, will require an enhanced understanding of malaria epidemiology, population characteristics, and efficacy of clinical and public health programs at the local level. Currently, there is a dearth of information available to fine-tune malaria control interventions at the local level. A key obstacle is the fragmentation of data into silos, as existing data cannot be brought together to estimate accurate and timely health metrics.

Objective

Driven by the need to bring malaria surveillance data from different sources together to support evidence-based decision making, we are conducting the “Scalable Data Integration for Disease Surveillance” (SDIDS) project. This project aims to foster the integration of existing surveillance data to support evidence-based decision-making in malaria control and demonstrate a model applicable to other diseases. Central to this initiative is collaboration between academia, governmental and NGO sectors.