Surveillance Systems: Analysis, Dissemination, and Special Systems

In this first module, we're going to focus on the analyses used in health surveillance. Specifically, we're going to talk about how to interpret time trend data that's harnessed as part of health surveillance programs and strategies used to detect temporal aberrations. We're also going to build on some of your earlier specialization lessons on descriptive epidemiology with a real focus on how it can be used in the analyses of person, place, and time in the context of surveillance data. I really want to highlight throughout the module how we often underutilize surveillance data to analyze complex issues, but I also want to talk about the some of the limitations that exist within the data sets.

In this module, we will explore strategies for the presentation of surveillance data and some of the complex legal elements that affect the use of health surveillance data. Now, surveillance data are fundamentally different from research data. In research studies, people provide explicit consent for how their data are going to be used. For surveillance data, the collection doesn't include explicit consent. As a result, there are very specific laws governing how the data can and should be used to drive public health programs. We'll also discuss communication strategies in health surveillance given how sensitive it can be to message health surveillance data, and the associated recommendations that come along with communicating these data.

So we're switching gears today from communicable diseases to noncommunicable diseases, or often called, chronic diseases. I'll present some of the frameworks and approaches that have been developed to guide chronic disease surveillance and then I'll focus on giving different examples of these, ranging from cancer to cardiovascular health systems. Taking you back to the surveillance cycle from Dr. Gurley's course, "Surveillance Systems: Building Blocks," I'll provide some context on how these chronic disease surveillance systems can really impact chronic disease prevention strategies if communicated effectively. And that brings us back to communication, where we will again focus on approaches to communicate these complex issues and then give an example of how to apply communication framework in the context of a chronic disease.