Page 60 - Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification & Response Systems - Corien Swaan

58 Chapter 3
reporting from national to international health organizations. In addition, stud- ies describing a surveillance algorithm, and studies which did not provide in- formation about the designated criteria for timeliness of notification, i.e. the ‘predefined timeframe’, were excluded. Studies without predefined timeframe, but comparing timeliness of different notification systems were included. Sys- tematic reviews were excluded, however their conclusions are reflected upon in the discussion.
One researcher (AB) reviewed all titles and abstracts. In case of doubt about inclusions or exclusion, another researcher (CS) was consulted and through dis- cussion a decision was taken.
Subsequently, references were imported into the bibliographic database Endnote library, where duplicates were identified and removed. The remain- ing articles were reviewed in full text to determine their inclusion for data ex- traction. Reference lists of the included articles and reviews were searched for additional literature.
Data extraction
Information extracted included the country or region of the study setting, year of publication, infectious disease(s), general or disease specific reporting sys- tem, study design (comparison study where two or more reporting methodolo- gies were compared, or evaluation study when one system was evaluated), level of reporting and methodology of reporting, legislation (mandatory or voluntary reporting), reporting delay studied, predefined timeframe for reporting and the outcomes of the reporting delay(s). The following categorizations were made: Level(s) of reporting:
- level 1 (L1): physician and/or laboratory to local public health department (LHD);
- level 2 (L2): LHD to regional health department (RHD);
- level 3 (L3): RHD to national health authority (NHA). Method of reporting:
- conventional reporting (postal mail, fax, telephone or e- mail);
- electronic reporting (including web-based reporting systems, as electron-
ic laboratory reporting (ELR), electronic automated laboratory reporting
(EALR).
- mobile phone reporting (using shore message services with mobile tele-
phones)
Reporting delay (see Figure 1):
- D1: delay between onset of disease and notification at local health depart-