Reply To: Week 2 Topic discussion 2

[Ching To Chung]

From the paper, I think integration with an electronic information management system would improve the two indicators of flexibiliy and representativeness.
Flexbility refers to the ability to change information needs or operating conditions with little additional resources. For the system, it is able to adapt and comply with WHO’s new case definition, and the surveillance system would also be able to allow investigation of other viral respiratory infections other than influenzas. However, the integration with an electronic information management system would likely make the system more flexible. The system is currently only sentinel and is only getting samples from a limited number of locations. By switcihing to the electronic system, the system would be much more scalable and the system could be expanded to a larger scale and include larger parts of the country. The electronic system would also be much more customizable, so the system could be changed to collect more relevant data, or help detect other diseases and pathogens. An electronic system would also be very convenient whenever there are changes to case definition. With statistical softwares to manipulate the data, it would be easy to filter out which patients match the new definition after inputting the new criteria.
Representativeness is about the coverage of the data that the system is able to capture, like the total number of patients, the greographical coverage. The system is only able to collect 14 sentinel sites in 8 regions, and it involves a lot of manual register at the sentinel locations which is slow and ineffective. By integrating with the electronic system, it would lower the resource requirements for more locations to join the surveillance effort, and more healthcare facilities would be able to join. This would likely increase the coverage of the data collected, and increase the amount of patients that are abled to be covered since the process is digitized and sped up, allowing us to serve and test more patients.