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Online J Public Health InformOnline J Public Health InformOJPHIOnline Journal of Public Health Informatics1947-2579University of Illinois at Chicago Library ojphi-10-e6610.5210/ojphi.v10i1.8550ISDS 2018 Conference AbstractsUsing an Open GIS Framework and Epidemiological Intelligence for
Dengue Surveillance Chan Ta-Chien *
1
Lin Bo-Cheng 
1
Kuo Chiao-Ling 
1
Chiang Li-hsiang 
2
1 Academia Sinica, Taipei City,
Taiwan; 2 Public Health Bureau, Pingtung County
Government, Pingtung County, Taiwan* Ta-Chien Chan E-mail: dachianpig@gmail.com30 5 2018 2018 10 1 e66ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2018. This is an Open Access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting
all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.Keywords 
GISRisk managementOutbreak controlOpen dataGeocoding
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Objective
In this paper we designed one cross-platform surveillance system to assist dengue
fever surveillance, outbreak investigation and risk management of dengue fever.

Introduction
In the 2015 dengue outbreak in Taiwan, 43,784 people were infected and 228 died,
making it the nation’s largest outbreak ever. Facing the increasing threat of
dengue, the integration of health information for prevention and control of
outbreaks becomes very important. Based on past epidemics, the areas with higher
incidence of dengue fever are located in southern Taiwan. Without a smart and
integrated surveillance system, the information on case distribution, high risk
areas, mosquito surveillance, flooding areas and so on is fragmented. The first-line
public health workers need to check all this information through different systems
manually. When outbreaks occurred, paper-based outbreak investigation forms had to
be prepared and filled in by public health workers. Then, they needed to enter part
of this information into Taiwan CDC’s system. Duplicated work occurred and
cost lots of labor time during the epidemic period. Therefore, we choose one rural
county, Pingtung County, with scarce financial resources, to set up a new dengue
surveillance system.

Methods
We designed a web-based cross-platform system based on an open geographical
information system (GIS) framework including Openlayers, Javascript, PHP, MySQL and
open data from government open data in Taiwan. There were seven epidemiological
intelligence functions within the system including risk management, outbreak
investigation, planning controlled areas, intelligent detection of high- risk areas,
useful tools for decision making, historical epidemics, and system management. The
website was developed by responsive web design which can let public health workers
check information and fill in the investigation form by any devices.

Results
The system was promptly set up in June 2016. With first-line public health
workers’ efforts and the help of the surveillance system, there were no
indigenous dengue fever cases after the system was implemented. There were sporadic
imported cases from south- east Asia. The dengue surveillance system achieved three
major improvements: integration of all decision support information; digitalization
and automation of outbreak investigation; and planning the control areas. The
results on outbreak investigation and mosquito surveillance can directly transfer to
Taiwan CDC’s database by Web Application Programming Interface (API). It can
avoid duplicated work for disease surveillance.

Conclusions
Through introducing the new dengue surveillance system into local health departments,
first-line public health workers can update all epidemic information at the same
time. During epidemic periods, it can provide demographic, epidemiological,
environmental, and entomological information for decision making. During
non-epidemic periods, it can highlight the high risk areas for enhanced surveillance
to reduce the risk of outbreaks.

Acknowledgments 
This research was supported by a grant from National Health
Research Institute, Taiwan.
==== Refs
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