Open data in public health surveillance systems: a case study using the French Sentinelles network

Public Health Surveillance (PHS) produces an increasing number of health indicators. Exposing these data is at the core of interoperability; however no standard has yet been adopted for such information on the internet.

Here, we compared two approaches to expose data from the French Sentinelles network, an information system focusing on communicable diseases surveillance in the general population. We implemented SDMX-HD (Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange-Health Domain), a standard supported by government agencies to exchange statistical data and OpenData (OData), a general purpose protocol proposed by Microsoft Corp. The same data were described using SDMX-HD (available at http://sdmx.sentiweb.fr) and using OData (http://odata.sentiweb.fr).

These two use cases proved the feasibility of opening public health data on the internet, and highlighted difficulties: SDMX, a full-featured solution, encouraged harmonization and reusability, sustainability, but required complex developments and tools; OData was much simpler to implement but required a "from scratch" description and did not encourage reusability. From an end-user perspective, integration in every-day tools is not achieved yet. These two approaches are a first step to interoperability in PHS.