In Finland, the digitalisation of healthcare data is highly advanced. However, numerous separate registries are used in infectious disease surveillance, many of which require manual data entry. There are also delays and gaps in the flow of information, and the full content of the data cannot be utilised.
In the FinSurveillance project, a permanent infectious disease surveillance system is being developed to monitor as accurately as possible, using registry data:
- the prevalence of infectious diseases and the burden of disease they cause
- risk factors predisposing to severe infections
- the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of various vaccination programmes
- antimicrobial resistance
- healthcare-associated infections.
The system will also improve our country's pandemic preparedness.
Based on the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Parliament and the Council issued Regulation (EU) 2022/2371 on cross-border health threats and opened a funding call for the development of national infectious disease surveillance systems, from which this project has received funding.
Goals
The aim is to combine different data sources to create a comprehensive and sustainable infectious disease surveillance system in Finland.
Additionally, the goal is to improve the analysis, interpretation, reporting, and presentation/visualisation of data to provide better information, for example, to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) surveillance systems, to the wellbeing services counties in Finland, and to the public through the FInnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) website (thl.fi).
Implementation
The project will permanently integrate data flows from various registries.
The infection data reported by laboratories to the Infectious Disease Register will be combined with:
- primary and specialised healthcare visit and treatment data from outpatient care, hospital care, and intensive care, to assess the severity of infections and the burden of disease they cause in the population and the use of healthcare services
- vaccination data, to study the effectiveness, safety, and cost-effectiveness of vaccinations
- previous treatment periods and visits to healthcare, to identify risk factors predisposing to severe infections, such as chronic diseases and pregnancy
- prescriptions, medication purchases, and special medication rights, to monitor the use of antimicrobials and consider medication costs in cost-effectiveness analysis when evaluating a new vaccine for the vaccination programme
- mortality data (e.g., cause-specific mortality)
- social care notification registry conditions data, such as living in elderly care facilities
- more detailed health data on elderly people living in institutions.
Using AI tools, information on symptoms will be collected directly from patient narrative texts to identify, for example, surgical site infections. Additionally, data lakes from specialised healthcare in three wellbeing services counties will be utilised as a new surveillance data source to monitor, for example, antimicrobials used in hospitals or cancer drugs causing immunodeficiency.
The project will also produce an epidemiological platform for contact tracing and infectious disease modelling, and explore the possibility of setting up participatory surveillance where citizens could report their home test results.
Funding
EU4Health Programme (EU4H) and THL
Contact details
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