Please register to participate. See below.
Infectious disease surveillance management (IDSM) and response entails monitoring the cause of an infectious disease (infectious agent), how it spreads, including the damages the infectious agent causes, as well as measures and restrictions put forth to reduce the spread of or remove of the infectious agent. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) is responsible for monitoring 72 infectious diseases and thus contribute to international disease surveillance.
Within IDSM and response, contact tracing plays a key role. Medical specialists within different medical disciplines perform contact tracing and are responsible for notifying NIPH about positive cases of diseases within their discipline. In Norway, we have worked with IDSM and response for nearly 200 years and up until May 2020, positive cases of notifiable infectious diseases were reported to NIPH using pen and paper.
Within a few months after covid-19 was considered a pandemic, Norwegian municipalities had developed contact-tracing information systems (CTIS) consisting of human resources, digital contact tracing systems and test-stations for covid-19. However, this CTIS currently only supports contact tracing of covid-19. Other notifiable infectious diseases are still being contact traced by the respective medical specialists.
One of my questions is therefore: How can we ensure sustainable and resilient CTIS that can be utilized in “peace times” and, when necessary, scaled up to handle “a big storm”, and then, when the storm has passed, scaled down again?
Ragnhild Bassøe Gundersen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at Health Information Systems Programme (HISP), Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.
Her research interests relates to the intersection and mutual influence between people/organizations and technology. How to build sustainable and resilient health information systems (HIS) that can both scale up and down, depending on the current need.
Registration
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Contact person: Øystein Flø Baste.
The Zoom-link will be distributed to everyone signing up to the event. The lecture will be given in English.