Guiding Principles for Biosurveillance to Achieve Situational Awareness
Through discussions with state and local experts, the following principles for developing and improving biosurveillance information systems were identified and elucidated:
View the full report, "Improving Public Health Preparedness: Strengthening Biosurveillance Systems for Enhanced Situational
Awareness", for more information.
- Systems to be be used for situational awareness during and event should be built on the foundation of surveillance systems used day to day as part of normal operations.
- These systems require ongoing investment for maintenance and optimization.
- These surveillance systems must be designed to support workflow at the local and state levels, and also to provide regional and national understanding of the nature and extent of the event.
- Formal business process, workflow analysis and requirements development should be performed to guide design and development of these systems. The "business" of public health should be considered analytically in the design of these systems.
- Systems must be designed to comply with applicable standards (e.g., messaging standards, data standards, etc.) in order to be scalable and interoperable.
- Systems must also be sufficiently flexible to adapt to local needs (e.g., tracking sub-jurisdictional data), particularly in the context of event response where system customization may be needed.
- Public health agencies should be adequately staffed and resourced to design, manage, and optimize core information system capabilities and to use information to support decision making during a public health emergency.
View the full report, "Improving Public Health Preparedness: Strengthening Biosurveillance Systems for Enhanced Situational
Awareness", for more information.