In December 2009, Taiwan’s CDC stopped its sentinel physician surveillance system. Currently, infectious disease surveillance systems in Taiwan rely on not only the national notifiable disease surveillance system but also real-time outbreak and disease surveillance (RODS) from emergency rooms, and the outpatient and hospitalization surveillance system from National Health Insurance data. However, the timeliness of data exchange and the number of monitored syndromic groups are limited. The spatial resolution of monitoring units is also too coarse, at the city level.

Since 2008, drug overdose deaths exceeded the number of motor vehicle traffic-related deaths in Indiana, and the gap continues to widen1. While federal funding opportunities are available for states, it often takes years for best practices to be developed, shared, and published. Similarly, local health departments (LHDs) may experience lengthy delays to receive finalized county health statistics.

In the 2015 dengue outbreak in Taiwan, 43,784 people were infected and 228 died, making it the nation’s largest outbreak ever. Facing the increasing threat of dengue, the integration of health information for prevention and control of outbreaks becomes very important. Based on past epidemics, the areas with higher incidence of dengue fever are located in southern Taiwan. Without a smart and integrated surveillance system, the information on case distribution, high risk areas, mosquito surveillance, flooding areas and so on is fragmented.