Page 213 - Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification & Response Systems - Corien Swaan

- Quantitative timeframes are relevant to evaluate the effectiveness of re- sponses to enhance the preparedness system
Other findings
- Notifications through Electronic Medical Record (EMR) would also provide clinical information and epidemiological information, facilitating MHS in decision whether the case fulfills the notification criteria and needs public health action or not.
- Differentiation in patient, doctor and laboratory delay nowadays is not possible as dates for consultation physician and initiating laboratory test are not collected. To reduce disease identification, insight in these delays is necessary through collection of dates of disease onset and doctor’s con- sultation.
- Reduction of doctor, laboratory or notification delay can be achieved through alerts during outbreaks and guidance on case definitions and lab- oratory test availability.
- Timely identification of a disease affects both the local reporting delay as the effectiveness of response.
9.6 Recommendations for practice
Timely disease identification and notification
- We recommend using medians in measuring notification delays, and per- centages of timely notifications for measuring reaching thresholds for time- liness
- International standardization of thresholds for measuring timeliness of no- tifications systems according local timeframes facilitate quantitative assess- ments. We recommend ≥ 80% timely notifications as sufficient, ≥ 50% up to 80% as partly sufficient and < 50% as insufficient.
- MHS need to educate, train and provide feedback on notifications to re- porting health professionals in their regions, and monitor notifications de- lays, with focus on botulism, diphtheria, hantavirus, leptospirosis, malaria, MRSA CA, Q-fever and STEC.
- For measles, STEC and shigellosis, awareness rising among physicians and laboratories is needed to keep, or bring, the total local disease identifica- tion delay within the outbreak control limit.
General discussion 211
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