Selecting Essential Information for Biosurveillance—A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Abstract

The National Strategy for Biosurveillancedefines biosurveillance as “the process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information related to all-hazards threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, or plant health to achieve early detection and warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of an incident, and to enable better decision-making at all levels.” However, the strategy does not specify how “essential information” is to be identified and integrated into the current biosurveillance enterprise, or what the metrics qualify information as being “essential”. Thequestion of data stream identification and selection requires a structured methodology that can systematically evaluate the tradeoffs between the many criteria that need to be taken in account. Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, a type of multi-criteria decision analysis, can provide a well-defined, structured approach that can offer solutions to this problem. While the use of Multi-Attribute Utility Theoryas a practical method to apply formal scientific decision theoretical approaches to complex, multi-criteria problems has been demonstrated in a variety of fields, this method has never been applied to decision support in biosurveillance.We have developed a formalized decision support analytic framework that can facilitate identification of “essential information” for use in biosurveillance systems or processes and we offer this framework to the global BSV community as a tool for optimizing the BSV enterprise. To demonstrate utility, we applied the framework to the problem of evaluating data streams for use in an integrated global infectious disease surveillance system.

Syndromic Surveillance System for Korea–US Joint Biosurveillance Portal: Design and Lessons Learned

“…33 Internet news media, social networking services, and government as well as nongovernment reports have been suggested as resources because they can be used to detect any kind of threat. 34,35 Advantages of the BSP compared with other biosurveillance systems are the capabilities to integrate the military and civilian surveillance efforts of the ROK and the United States; to leverage other existing biosurveillance systems, incorporating them into the BSP; and to expand the user interface and analytic tools through an agile development process involving user feedback and implementation of functional exercises.…”

Interfacing a Biosurveillance Portal and an International Network of Institutional Analysts to Detect Biological Threats

“…21 Between 2008 and 2010, the EAR project developed and implemented a new synergistic combined epidemic intelligence technical tool (''EAR portal''), which pooled information from 7 IBBS providers. The performance of the EAR portal highlighted in a previous evaluation a higher sensitivity for relevant information when compared to each individual internet-based biosurveillance system.…”