Customised and Automated Intelligence for National Communicable Disease Analysis and Decision-Making
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Abstract
Background
A large amount of timely information about health related events is available on the local and regional level, such as on the municipalities’ and county councils’ web pages. Because of reporting delays to the national level, there might even be information on current events regarding various notifiable diseases. In order to gain time and to reduce potential negative consequences, an automated system that collects intelligence data in a qualitatively and timely manner could contribute to better decision-making at the national level.
Objective
At the Swedish national institute for communicable diseases, we have implemented a system called SPAN that collects information on outbreaks and other health related events. The objective is to increase the knowledge at the national level of events that could have a wider impact in the country. A second objective is to – with time – be able to look at trends, that is, changes in disease patterns that may affect national decision-making.
Methods
MolluskNG is a web fetcher that handles HTML pages and RSS feeds, developed at CERT-SE at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. It is a server application that scans a predefined set of web pages for new links. Regular expressions and customized Java code are used to filter items on predefined keywords that easily can be modified.
SPAN crawls approximately 300 web sites each night, covering all official sites of the municipalities and the county medical offices in the country. If a new link with matching content is detected the whole page is exported as an HTML email and sent to a designated inbox. This inbox is screened by an epidemiologist daily and each relevant item is classified into any of three categories and submitted to a database. The categorisation is based on the priority the institute gives to the affecting agent, whether it is a local or regional event, and if any preventive measures can be taken.
Results
Today SPAN crawls all municipalities’ and all counties’ web pages and RSS feeds in Sweden. The collected information is screened and categorised. During a pilot phase of two months, 178 items were fetched. Of these, 152 were deemed appropriate (contained information on health related events). Of those, in turn, 26 contained information that was deemed highly interesting for the national level. These latter items are continuously visualised on a digital map over Sweden, which is updated daily and published on the agency’s homepage.
Conclusions
With SPAN, the national institute for communicable disease control has a better insight into local and regional health related events. SPAN is reliable and can easily be customised to the institute’s changing needs. It will in the near future be extended with international news items and verified syndromic surveillance signals from such systems at the institute. However, already at its current stage, SPAN contributes to better national decision-making.
A large amount of timely information about health related events is available on the local and regional level, such as on the municipalities’ and county councils’ web pages. Because of reporting delays to the national level, there might even be information on current events regarding various notifiable diseases. In order to gain time and to reduce potential negative consequences, an automated system that collects intelligence data in a qualitatively and timely manner could contribute to better decision-making at the national level.
Objective
At the Swedish national institute for communicable diseases, we have implemented a system called SPAN that collects information on outbreaks and other health related events. The objective is to increase the knowledge at the national level of events that could have a wider impact in the country. A second objective is to – with time – be able to look at trends, that is, changes in disease patterns that may affect national decision-making.
Methods
MolluskNG is a web fetcher that handles HTML pages and RSS feeds, developed at CERT-SE at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. It is a server application that scans a predefined set of web pages for new links. Regular expressions and customized Java code are used to filter items on predefined keywords that easily can be modified.
SPAN crawls approximately 300 web sites each night, covering all official sites of the municipalities and the county medical offices in the country. If a new link with matching content is detected the whole page is exported as an HTML email and sent to a designated inbox. This inbox is screened by an epidemiologist daily and each relevant item is classified into any of three categories and submitted to a database. The categorisation is based on the priority the institute gives to the affecting agent, whether it is a local or regional event, and if any preventive measures can be taken.
Results
Today SPAN crawls all municipalities’ and all counties’ web pages and RSS feeds in Sweden. The collected information is screened and categorised. During a pilot phase of two months, 178 items were fetched. Of these, 152 were deemed appropriate (contained information on health related events). Of those, in turn, 26 contained information that was deemed highly interesting for the national level. These latter items are continuously visualised on a digital map over Sweden, which is updated daily and published on the agency’s homepage.
Conclusions
With SPAN, the national institute for communicable disease control has a better insight into local and regional health related events. SPAN is reliable and can easily be customised to the institute’s changing needs. It will in the near future be extended with international news items and verified syndromic surveillance signals from such systems at the institute. However, already at its current stage, SPAN contributes to better national decision-making.
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