Computer-based infectious disease surveillance systems represent a major step forward in disease surveillance. This book analyzes and evaluates the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of existing surveillance systems under a unified framework.

Computer-based infectious disease surveillance systems are capable of real-time or near real-time detection of serious illnesses and potential bioterrorism agent exposures and represent a major step forward in disease surveillance. Infectious Disease Informatics: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense is an in-depth monograph that analyzes and evaluates the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of existing surveillance systems under a unified framework, and presents the first book-length coverage of the subject from an informatics-driven perspective.

Individual chapters consider the state of the art, including the facilitation of data collection, sharing and transmission; a focus on various outbreak detection methods; data visualization and information dissemination issues; and system assessment and other policy issues. Eight chapters then report on several real-world case studies, summarizing and comparing eight syndromic surveillance systems, including those that have been adopted by many public health agencies (e.g., RODS and BioSense). The book concludes with a discussion of critical issues and challenges, with a look to future directions.

This book is an excellent source of current information for researchers in public health and IT. Government public health officials and private-sector practitioners in both public health and IT will find the most up-to-date information available, and students from a variety of disciplines, including public health, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy will get a comprehensive look at the concepts, techniques, and practices of syndromic surveillance.

While all the international infectious disease surveillance systems share similar objectives, each system site varies in its system architecture, its information processing management techniques, its algorithms for detection, and each focus on different diseases. INFECTIOUS DISEASE INFORMATICS: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense corrects these problems. The book will analyze and evaluate the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of the existing surveillance systems from a systematic framework. Specifically, the book will meet the following critical needs in detecting infectious diseases:

1. It will provide an integrated, synthesized, and interdisciplinary analysis of infectious surveillance techniques. It will include statistical modeling techniques, but go beyond statistical modeling to include information systems design, data standards, computational aspects of bio-surveillance, information visualization, and system evaluation.
2. It will emphasize the practical importance of the area and integrate the material from Public Health, Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Public Administration Policy, Geographical Information Systems, etc. into a unified state-of-the-art treatment of syndromic surveillance systems.

By its very nature, infectious disease surveillance is a dynamic, fast-moving field. Therefore the book will provide policy makers and public health practitioners with the most recent research findings, methodologies, and implementation issues from case studies of concrete application scenarios.