Electronic event-based biosurveillance systems (EEBS’s) that use near real-time information from the internet are an increasingly important source of epidemiologic intelligence. However, there has not been a systematic assessment of EEBS evaluations, which could identify key uncertainties about current systems and guide EEBS development to most effectively exploit web-based information for biosurveillance. To conduct this assessment, we searched PubMed and Google Scholar to identify peer-reviewed evaluations of EEBS’s. We included EEBS’s that use publicly available internet information sources, cover events that are relevant to human health, and have global scope. To assess the publications using a common framework, we constructed a list of 17 EEBS attributes from published guidelines for evaluating health surveillance systems. We identified 11 EEBS’s and 20 evaluations of these EEBS’s. The number of published evaluations per EEBS ranged from 1 (Gen-Db, GODsN, MiTAP) to 8 (GPHIN, HealthMap). The median number of evaluation variables assessed per EEBS was 8 (range, 3–15). Ten published evaluations contained quantitative assessments of at least one key variable. No evaluations examined usefulness by identifying specific public health decisions, actions, or outcomes resulting from EEBS outputs. Future EEBS assessments should identify and discuss critical indicators of public health utility, especially the impact of EEBS’s on public health response.
ObjectiveTo assess evaluations of electronic event-based biosurveillance systems (EEBS's) and define priorities for EEBS evaluations. IntroductionEEBS's that use near real-time information from the Internet are an increasingly important source of intelligence for public health organizations (1, 2). However, there has not been a systematic assessment of EEBS evaluations, which could identify uncertainties about current systems and guide EEBS development to effectively exploit digital information for surveillance. MethodsWe searched PubMed and consulted EEBS experts to identify EEBS's that met the following criteria: uses publicly-available Internet info sources, includes events that impact humans, and has global scope. We constructed a list of 17 key evaluation variables using guidelines for evaluating health surveillance systems, and identified the key variables included in evaluations per EEBS, as well as the number of EEBS's evaluated for each key variable (3,4).
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