Pakistan - Proposal for Plan to Strengthen Integrated Disease Surveillance

Aamer Ikram and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Pakistan will develop a plan for an upgraded and integrated disease surveillance system that detects, reports, investigates and responds to multiple public health threats from communicable diseases like cholera and natural disasters such as floods. The current disease surveillance systems in Pakistan are fragmented and there is no central repository of health information. This hampers data-driven decision-making, which is needed to prevent the spread of disease. They will develop a costed action plan and conduct a feasibility analysis for integrating multiple disease surveillance and response data streams through application programming interfaces (APIs), which will result in national patient registries. This will also involve building and training machine learning models to link different data sets, and developing and implementing artificial intelligence technology with visualization tools to improve data analysis and forecasting.