Surveillance, service and public health science

Background: Mobile Health Clinics (MHCs) abound across the United States, often serving patients who are the forefront of emerging disease trends. To date these disparate programs have not been able to aggregate and visualize their data to identify these emerging health trends. By creating a web-based tool to collect MHCs service data we created a community of providers capable of capturing disease trends. Objectives: Set up a surveillance system via MHCs that tracks and maps disease-specific health trends. Methods: Build a web-based tool, with mapping capability that connects the community of MHCs. Invite members of the Mobile Health Clinics Association (MHCA) to participate in the project thereby “putting them on the map". Invite these MHCs to share annual data: service location, patient demographics, number of disease-specific screenings/services delivered. Results: One hundred and eighteen clinics are on the map. Forty-three clinics are connected for ongoing data entry. Nineteen programs entered data about the number of disease-specific services delivered. 3 programs have entered mulityear data. This tool has connected programs across the country, developed an ongoing data collection system capable of geographically displaying disease-specific annual reports. Conclusions: Published literature on the field of mobile health and its surveillance capabilities is none existent. This project has been able to demonstrate the ability to bring together this previously fragmented and unstudied segment of the healthcare sector, aggregate their data for purposes of identifying trends and begin the process of building a real-time data collecting, aggregating and mapping system.