Health Systems for Syndromic and Epidemiological Surveillance

Health surveillance practices date back to decades ago. Traditionally, such practices to gather health data have been manual; more recently, however, computerized health information systems have been applied to enhance and facilitate health information acquisition for surveillance. The so-called health surveillance systems put in practice the systematic acquisition of health data, which is stored and processed for expert analysis. This chapter makes a survey of health surveillance systems dedicated to syndromic and epidemiological surveillance, identifying the different design and technological strategies adopted in the development of such systems. The aims of such a survey are: (1) to provide practitioners with some information about the collective expertise of health information system architects in the design and implementation of syndromic and epidemiological surveillance systems; and (2) to pave the way for the establishment of software product lines dedicated to such systems.