Health Informatics and Surveillance

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Identify modern surveillance systems implemented at the local, state, regional, and national levels related to diabetes selected.

Disease surveillance systems are implemented at different levels from local to national levels. The public health sector has introduced modern disease surveillance systems for chronic diseases such as diabetes that are already in use. The first modern diabetes surveillance system implemented at state level is the Connecticut (CT) Diabetes Surveillance System (CDSS). The following program was designed to provide timely and effective information on diabetes disease and its complications in Connecticut. In addition, the system identifies risk factor information on diabetes infection. The system is capable of providing information regarding Connecticut hospital admissions and deaths caused by diabetes, prevalence data, and other reports. The second modern surveillance system is the National diabetes surveillance system implemented in the United States. This system was introduced in 1997 and tracks prevalence and incidence of diabetes, hospitalization, death rates, and other diabetes-related infections. The other modern diabetes surveillance system used at national level today is the National Diabetes Surveillance System (NDSS). This is a computerized system that analyses the prevalence of diabetes infection (Rothman, Greenland & Lash, 2008).

Evaluate the effectiveness of the modern systems in monitoring diabetes.

The modern disease surveillance systems are very effective in the surveillance of communicable diseases. These modern systems are effective in the following ways (Lombardo & Buckeridge, 2007). Firstly, they are consistence because they ensure the most important set of variables are collected at every level for analysis. Secondly, the methods are flexible since they allow for additional of surveillance information at any time. For example, using the NDSS, a health researcher can easily add new information after the older is already analyzed and the system updates automatically. Thirdly, the modern diabetes surveillance systems are cost effective. Most of these systems use the excising data from past researches saving the cost of collecting data. Finally, the modern surveillance systems are more accessible to all locations. The data collected is easily made available to the public through the public health website. In addition, the methods are more confident to ensure all personal identifiers are removed (Jajosky & Groseclose, 2004). All these factors increase the effectiveness of these modern surveillance systems used in monitoring diabetes.

Analyze the government’s responsibilities for monitoring diabetes at the different political levels (local, state, regional, and national). Include an explanation of how the reporting requirements differ at each level.

The government holds the biggest responsibility in ensuring the designed diabetes surveillance systems flow to all political levels (local, state, regional, and national). At the local level, the government assigns people to survey different areas especially at village level. The information collected is taken to the public health offices for analysis to determine the prevalence of diabetes. The reports provided on this level aims at monitoring the effect from different areas. At the state level, the government carries surveillance at different health care centers where cases of diabetes are reported. The surveillance information given by the systems are used to monitor diabetes infections. On the other hand, at regional level the method of reporting is different from the state level. The health officer involved at the regional level provides information on diabetes surveillance from different regions countrywide. Finally, the national monitoring systems carry out a nationwide evaluation of diabetes infection. The reports from different states, regions, and local authorities are analyzed together to come up with a nationwide report on diabetes surveillances (M’ikanatha, 2013).

Suggest how you would apply any lessons learned in this exercise to the surveillance system you are constructing.

In order to construct an effective and working surveillance system, the following aspects have been pointed out. First of all, the surveillance system should be able to evaluate the causes, prevalence, and number of infections of the disease in question. Secondly, the system being constructed will be automated in order to allow quick and flexible ways of inputting data. Automation is important since it enables the system to operate in the modern environment.

References

Jajosky, R. A., & Groseclose, S. L. (2004). Evaluation of reporting timeliness of public health surveillance systems for infectious diseases. BMC Public Health, 4, 2938.

Lombardo, J. S., & Buckeridge, D. L. (Eds.). (2007). Disease surveillance: A public health informatics approach. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Interscience.

Rothman, K. J., Greenland, S., & Lash, T. L. (2008). Modern epidemiology. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

M’ikanatha, N. M. (2013). Infectious disease surveillance. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell.