Concepts, objectives and analysis of public health surveillance systems

Abstract

Public health surveillance (PHS) systems are an important tool to map the distribution and burden of disease as well as enable efficient distribution of resources to fight a disease. The surveillance systems are used to detect, report, track a disease as well as assess the response to the disease and people's attitudes. PHS systems are changing with the rapid change in technology and are becoming more real-time responsive with availability of new type of data such as online content and social media data. This review presents the basics of surveillance systems and develop from it to show the evolution of surveillance systems. The different forms of data available, surveillance methods and surveillance types are also reviewed such as social media based, web-based and clinical data based PHS maps. This review provide comprehensive details of the surveillance systems in terms of data types used, source of data and purpose of the surveillance system.