226514 New and Innovative Modular Application for Communicable Disease Surveillance and Management

Monday, November 8, 2010

John Kutcy, BSc, MBA , Healthcare Industry, IBM Canada Limited, Markham, ON, Canada
Tracy Forbes, Director , ACG, Public Health Information Management, Victoria, BC, Canada
Background: In the aftermath of the SARS outbreak in Canada, one of the weaknesses that was identified in the Naylor Report that analyzed the outbreak was the lack of effective jurisdictional public health IT systems that could be used to assist with disease prevention, surveillance and management.

Objective: Representatives from Canadian jurisdictions worked together for three years to document the requirements that would provide robust immunization management, early detection and outbreak management systems that could be used by jurisdictions across the country.

Methods: After a scan of available Public Health IT systems, it was determined that no commercial off-the-shelf systems were available that would satisfy the desired functionality. Work then began on selecting vendors that could work with the Canadian governments to build theses industry leading systems.

Results: Leading IT and public health firms worked with the Canadian governments and over two hundred public health professionals from across the country for over three years to create the first production version of this application suite which is now available. The result is a solution that provides both front line service providers and public health decision makers with critical information, reusing centralized data where possible. It will help improve health outcomes through enhanced immunization tracking and vaccine inventory management, and it will help to manage outbreaks through early detection, rapid verification, and appropriate response to epidemic prone and emerging diseases. The highly scalable, configurable, modular and innovative nature of the application makes it potentially usable by jurisdictions worldwide, and several countries who have heard of the project have already expressed interest in finding out more about it.

Conclusions/Discussion: This may be the most comprehensive and interoperable application of its type. Discussion is expected to be mainly about the ways the system would be used and the various benefits this system offers.

Learning Areas:
Administration, management, leadership
Epidemiology
Protection of the public in relation to communicable diseases including prevention or control

Learning Objectives:
Discuss the extent to which industry leading case management and outbreak management systems can be used to investigate cases more thoroughly, detect outbreaks earlier and manage them more effectively Describe many benefits that can be derived by having immunization management systems that have powerful new functions such as the capability to track immunity and provide forecasts at the antigen level Describe how public health IT systems that are designed to interoperate and share centralized data can provide epidemiologists and other public health professionals with more powerful analysis and decision making capabilities

Keywords: Communicable Disease, Infectious Diseases

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have lead multiple Public Health Information System development projects, and supported and managed regional, national and international implementations within the public health community. I am a Business Lead and Public Health Subject Matter Expert on the BC Public Health Solution development project.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 3401.1: Global Health Informatics Capacity Building and Disease Surveillance 1