A framework for enhancing public health quality in surveillance systems

Health surveillance systems are crucial to make sure that health threats are detected, monitored, and dealt with. The quality of such a system ensures that it can provide continuous diagnostic services, clinical guidance, and inform adequate interventions to health professionals; track, investigate, and report disease outbreaks; promote communication activities; test the efficacy of interventions against threats; and develop new methods for detection of health threats.

In this presentation we discuss a proposed adaption of a framework for health quality assessment of public health systems based on the 9 Public Health Aims for Quality, to the specific assessment of health surveillance systems using multi-criteria decision analysis. The evaluation of quality in this context is necessarily multi-dimensional, taking into account both quantitative criteria (such as the sensitivity of the system in detecting a disease outbreak) and qualitative criteria (such as the transparency level in which the system is run). It also involves determining trade-offs between these quality criteria, for instance between efficiency versus equity concerns, which can provide an overall index of quality for health surveillance systems.

Multi-criteria decision analysis has been increasingly, and effectively, employed in other types of health-related assessments, for example in supporting the prioritization of health threats, the assessment of benefits of new drugs, and the evaluation of capabilities against diseases. The framework we suggest here will enable the evaluation of quality of health surveillance systems, the identification of quality gaps, the assessment of quality-improvement actions, and the temporal monitoring of quality levels of these systems. We illustrate this multi-criteria framework analyzing a surveillance system.

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Learning Areas:

Administration, management, leadership
Program planning
Public health or related research
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Describe the application of the Public HEalth QUality AIms to Surveillance Systems

Keyword(s): Surveillance, Quality Improvement

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am presenting a methodology that could allow the measurement of quality frameworks. I have been working on this methodology, multi-criteria-decision-analysis, for the last seven years, published works and implemented applications in government departments.
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: 4104.0: Methodologies for Building Quality into Multiple Sectors of the Public Health System