Infectious Disease Informatics and Syndromic Surveillance

Infectious disease informatics (IDI) is an emerging field that studies data collection, sharing, modeling, and management issues in the domain of infectious diseases. This chapter discusses various technical components of IDI research from an information technology perspective. Syndromic surveillance is used to illustrate these components of IDI research, as it is a widely-adopted approach to detecting and responding to public health and bioterrorism events. Two case studies involving real-world applications and research prototypes are presented to illustrate the application context and relevant system design and data modeling issues.