Laboratory reporting and disease surveillance

Disease surveillance is an important tool which is used to identify diseases that are hazardous to public health. Historically, surveillance systems were created to capture physician reports of notifiable diseases. However, state evaluations of surveillance systems found inadequacies with systems based solely on physician reporting. To improve these systems, most state health departments have required reports of laboratory tests used to diagnose notifiable diseases. This article has a brief summary of the benefits and limitations of laboratory reporting.