Hi, welcome to the lecture. My name is Emily Gurley and I'm on faculty at the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Today we're going to talk about Surveillance Data Reporting Systems. So, essentially, what do we do with data that comes from Public Health Surveillance Systems? By the end of the lecture today, you should be able to identify the importance of reporting public health surveillance data for action. You should be able to identify key stakeholders for any surveillance system as well as give an example of an international disease reporting framework and a domestic reporting system here within the United States. There are a number of recommended readings for this lecture. First is by Hossain at all and that's a description of Hospital-based surveillance for Japanese Encephalitis and Bangladesh. We're going to be using that as an example to think about stakeholders for public health surveillance systems. In addition, there are two resources that describe data reporting systems. But first is at an international level and at the WHO website that you can access here, there are the International Health Regulations, were going to be talking about those in detail. In addition, the US CDC has a national notifiable diseases surveillance system and we're going to be using that as another example of a national platform for surveillance data reporting. In this section, we're going to talk about data reporting as part of the surveillance cycle. So, let's briefly review the Public Health Surveillance cycle. Public health surveillance is designed and performed to achieve a specific objective. Once an objective is defined for a public health surveillance system, data are collected, they are analyzed, they are interpreted, the results are disseminated, reported and shared and then those data are used to plan for action, public health action to improve the health of people living in a population. Then that action can also inform data collection going forward and so the cycle repeats and if it's working properly it continues to improve public health. Today, let's think specifically about data interpretation and how do we get from data interpretation to action. The key is results dissemination. So, who do we disseminate results to, who do we report our data to? There are a number of ways to think about this, a number of stakeholders, if you will, in the results of our public health surveillance. These can be the folks who are performing the surveillance, it can be anyone involved with the surveillance, it can even be people who aren't at all involved in the surveillance but maybe important for acting on the results from the surveillance. So, as we think about results dissemination, we think about two things. One, who has a stake and an interest in the results coming out of that surveillance system? Then two, what are the requirements for reporting the data? Ultimately there are some reporting frameworks and legal frameworks even for reporting surveillance data so we need to keep all of these things in mind. But again ultimately, what we're looking for here is a link to action. So, anyone responsible for action is going to be one of your stakeholders and often the requirements for reporting data from surveillance systems are directly linked to those who are going to act on them. So, from a particular surveillance system, who are you supposed to report to? Well, the stakeholders. First of all, those are people with a vested interest and the results of the surveillance system. Some examples of those could include; the public health authorities. Often, they are the ones responsible for conducting the surveillance. So, of course, they will be interested and what's found and what the recommendations are coming out of that surveillance. What about clinicians? They may be keenly vested in the results from your surveillance system, what you find could change their clinical practices, it could change how they think about their differential diagnosis, it could change what you want them to do in terms of reporting going forward. So there's certainly a stake holder. You also should think about the participating communities. Who are the people who are suffering from the disease that's under surveillance? Would they be interested in the results that you're finding? Maybe they're even important and that link to action perhaps they themselves need to take action to prevent disease or to help with reporting of disease going forward. So, communities are an important stakeholder from a public health surveillance program perspective.
