JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The purpose of syndromic surveillance is to provide early warning of public health incidents, real-time situational awareness during incidents and emergencies and to provide reassurance of lack of impact on the population, particularly during mass gatherings. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) currently coordinates a real-time syndromic surveillance service that encompasses six national syndromic surveillance systems reporting on daily health care usage across England. Each working day, UKHSA analyze syndromic data from over 200,000 daily patient encounters with the National Health Service (NHS), monitoring over 140 unique syndromic indicators, risk assessing over 50 daily statistical exceedances and taking and recommending public health action on these daily. This English syndromic surveillance service had its origins as a small exploratory pilot in a single region of England in 1999 involving a new pilot telehealth service, initially reporting only on ‘cold or flu’ calls. This pilot showed the value of syndromic surveillance in England, providing advanced warning of the start of seasonal influenza activity over existing laboratory-based surveillance systems. Since this initial pilot, a programme of real-time syndromic surveillance has evolved from the single-system, -region, -indicator pilot (using manual data transfer methods), to an all-hazard, multi-system, automated national service. The suite of systems now monitors a wide range of syndromes from acute respiratory illness to diarrhoea to cardiac conditions and is widely used in routine public health surveillance, monitoring seasonal respiratory disease and incidents such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we describe the 25-year evolution of the English syndromic surveillance system, focusing on the expansion and improvements in data sources and data management, the technological and digital enablers and novel methods of data analytics and visualization.