Surveillance during the COVID-19 epidemic and other epidemics: lessons learnt 2022-2023

Duration: Feb - Dec 2022

Background

A rapid response to cross-border health threats requires surveillance and monitoring mechanisms to ensure timely detection and identification of threats and for steering the public health response. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of efficient, timely and reliable surveillance systems. Digital real-time surveillance, integrated with other information domains, is therefore an essential pillar to ensure a timely response to health emergencies.

Objectives

The objective of this project is to gather the lessons learned from implementing digitalized, integrated and real-time surveillance systems at national and European level during the response to the COVID-19 crisis and earlier public health emergencies. The information gathered should be used to assess the performance of the surveillance systems for COVID-19 and other public health pandemics or epidemics with the aim of identifying best practices at national level that could be applied for the design of a strategy to establish an integrated, real-time and digitalised surveillance system, primarily aimed at public health emergencies, such as epidemics and pandemics.

Methods

A literature/scoping review will be conducted on the scientific evidence including lessons learned with regard to the use of integrated, digitalized and real-time surveillance systems. Through webinars and surveys among national authorities of the EU Member States, national experiences with digitalized, real-time and integrated surveillance systems will be identified.

Results

In terms of content, the results of this study includes a discussion paper, two webinars, an expert survey and a background document.