A practical roadmap to sustainable integration of surveillance for public health

In the last two decades public health organizations have made great strides in disease prevention while improving public health impact through new means of monitoring, diagnosing and treating individuals and communities. In recent years health organizations have been pressured to deliver faster, comprehensive and cost-effective public health services, in an era of declining budgets. IT has assisted in overall efficacy of public health programs in many ways. Nonetheless, the silo-systems developed over the last 20+ years have become an impediment to a long-term sustainable and cost-effective health IT programs. They contain redundant data with varying standards, preventing effective data integration across systems. Health organizations are shifting from disease-specific to integrated surveillance systems to begin the transformation to a single platform for surveillance, public health action, and preventative services to deliver integrated services to individuals and community. Integrated surveillance tools help the PHDs to collect, analyze and track public health events to advance their mission by monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the public health program. These systems are similar to Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in private sector where focus is on integrated processes and databases. Unlike ERPs whose emphasis is on business profitability, agility and competitive advantage, Integrated Surveillance Systems focus on population health and the “public health value chain”. This presentation provides a common-sense roadmap to organizations considering integrated surveillance systems and focuses on:

1. Identifying Key findings, Recommendations and Risks when embarking on an integration strategy

2. Evaluating and estimating the overall complexity of the integration effort

3. Identifying the benefits and perils of a unified platform

4. Defining an evaluation framework with clear goals, benefits and outcomes to ensure a systematic evaluation

5. Identifying needs for improvements to archaic business process and workflows

6. Identifying the resources required to plan, build, deploy, and maintain an integrated solution