Evaluation of an adjustable epidemiologic information system.

BACKGROUND: In order to facilitate public health response and to achieve early control of infectious disease epidemics, an adjustable epidemiologic information system (AEIS) was established in the Taiwan public health network in February 2006. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The performance of AEIS for the period 2006 through 2008 was evaluated based on a number of response times (RT) and the public health impact. After implementation of the system, the apparent overall shortened RT was mainly due to the shortening of personnel response time (PRT) and the time needed to draft a new questionnaire that incurred as personnel-system interface (PSI); PRT dropped from a fluctuating range of 9.8 ∼28.8 days in the first four months to <10 days in the following months and remained low till 2008 (0.88±1.52 days). The PSIs for newly emerged infectious diseases were 2.6 and 3.4 person-hours for H5N1 in 2007 and chikungunya in 2008, respectively, a much improvement from 1142.5 person-hours for SARS in 2003. The duration of each rubella epidemic cluster was evaluated as public health impact and showed a shortening trend (p = 0.019) that concurred with the shortening of PRT from 64.8±47.3 to 25.2±38.2 hours per cluster (p