Last September eHealth News reported on how
Once complete, the system will enable public health professionals to log on to a secure, easy-to-use portal and quickly enter information about cases, symptoms and outcomes, providing health officials with a timely and comprehensive view of the state of public health. Should a serious communicable disease occur, the system will alert public health officials who will plan and direct actions to protect Canadians.
It will include advanced features for tracking outbreaks, such as links to provincial laboratory systems, which will automatically feed abnormal test results into the database. Future plans include connections to pharmacy databases, to track surges in the use of tell-tale medications and remedies.
As well, the system will be able to quickly add databases and lists from multiple sources – such as airplane flight manifests or classroom student lists. In this way, if there’s a passenger who presents with signs of an infectious disease after disembarking, or a student who shows signs of a communicable disease, it will be possible for public health officials to quickly determine who else is at risk and to contact them.
Overall, the public health surveillance system will have six major components:
- communicable disease surveillance and management
- immunization
- outbreak management
- alerting
- workload management (scheduling)
- vaccine inventories and management.
The immunization component will allow physicians to keep closer tabs on the patients, especially when they have only partial records of a patient on hand. Using the centralized database in the public health system, doctors will be able to see when patients were last inoculated and if they’re due for new rounds of immunization.
Public health planners will also be able to better organize campaigns, as they’ll be able to plot geographical areas – down to postal code areas – where local populations are in need of immunization updates.
The system offers interfaces to geographic information systems (GIS), which are used by most provinces. Moreover, the solution will make use of HL7 v.3 as a communication standard.
The new surveillance system will be used by public health practitioners, including physicians, nurses, epidemiologists and government officials. It is estimated that there will be tens of thousands of users across Canada.
The solution will be among the first public health surveillance systems that is national in scope. It will provide linkages across the country, with future hopes that the connections can be built to other countries as well.