Epidemic alert system: A web-based grassroots model

Abstract

Most web-based disease surveillance systems that give epidemic alerts are based on very large and unstructured data from various news sources, social media and online queries that are parsed by complex algorithms. This has the tendency to generate results that are so diverse and non-specific. When considered along with the fact that there are no existing standards for mining and analyzing data from the internet, the results or decisions reached based on internet sources have been classified as low-quality. This paper proposes a web-based grassroots epidemic alert system that is based on data collected specifically from primary health centers, hospitals and registered laboratories. It takes a more traditional approach to indicator-based disease surveillance as a step towards standardizing web-based disease surveillance. It makes use of a threshold value that is based on the third quartile (75th percentile) to determine the need to trigger the alarm for the onset of an epidemic. It also includes, for deeper analysis, demographic information.