What This Toolkit Offers
The COVID-19 pandemic has both underscored the importance of disease surveillance systems to facilitate rapid response to health threats and revealed the limitations of existing systems. In most parts of the United States and other countries, approaches to surveillance are often disjointed, slow, and outdated, with limited digitalization, low interoperability between data streams, and infrequent integration of novel technologies such as genomics, environmental surveillance, and information systems best practices. Further, existing models for disease surveillance may not adequately cover hard-to-reach populations, such as Indigenous and/or rural communities, due to bidirectional distrust, remote location, financial barriers, mismatched priorities, and other factors. As a result, opportunities to improve public health and well-being are missed. For public health to realize its fundamental goal of improving people’s health, disease surveillance must effectively serve all communities.
Performing an assessment of a disease surveillance system is critical to ensuring that the right health information gets to the right people, at the right time, to make the right decisions for protecting the health of populations. Biomedical and computing advances are developing rapidly, in many cases producing technologies that can augment surveillance system quality. However, these technologies must be coupled with high-quality, well-resourced, and equitable surveillance systems, or the resulting data will only be incrementally improved, if at all.
What This Toolkit Is
This toolkit is the result of a collaboration between academic partners and public health agencies. It is intended to provide easy access to the key resources that are needed to assess the performance of disease surveillance systems and identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening them.
- What this toolkit includes
- Step-by-step guidance for how to conduct an assessment of a surveillance system
- Case studies of previous assessments with lessons learned and best practices
- Links to tools that can be adapted for many different contexts
- How this toolkit goes beyond existing resources
- Dynamic toolkit that will be updated as recommendations evolve, new tools and approaches are developed, and existing resources are improved
- Extended sections on stakeholder engagement and qualitative analysis
- Case studies included to show real-world application of approaches
- Considerations for equity integrated throughout guidance
This toolkit aims to provide step-by-step guidance and considerations for how to engage stakeholders in an intentional way, using participatory approaches in all steps of the assessment. The toolkit is designed to provide organizations, agencies, task forces or individuals wishing to assess the quality and functioning of one or more disease surveillance systems with the most up-to date approaches, tools, and training for planning, conducting, analyzing, and disseminating data from a surveillance system assessment.
This Surveillance Assessment Toolkit is flexible and should be viewed as a guide rather than an instructional manual. It is a living document that will be updated as new case studies and additional resources become available.
Who We Are
The authors of this toolkit represent a interdisciplinary group of public health professionals representing researchers and practitioners, including veterinarians, physicians, epidemiologists and experts in program science, statistics, information technology, and data science from the United States (US) and Latin America. While completing a systematic surveillance system assessment in Peru, the team recognized that there was a gap in available resources for surveillance system assessment and identified an opportunity to share our lessons learned through a toolkit.
Acknowledgments
This surveillance toolkit was developed with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with technical support from the Global Surveillance, Laboratory, and Data Systems Branch.