A review of evaluations of electronic event-based biosurveillance systems

Electronic event-based biosurveillance systems (EEBS's) that use near real-time information from the internet are an increasingly important source of epidemiologic intelligence. However, there has not been a systematic assessment of EEBS evaluations, which could identify key uncertainties about current systems and guide EEBS development to most effectively exploit web-based information for biosurveillance. To conduct this assessment, we searched PubMed and Google Scholar to identify peer-reviewed evaluations of EEBS's. We included EEBS's that use publicly available internet information sources, cover events that are relevant to human health, and have global scope. To assess the publications using a common framework, we constructed a list of 17 EEBS attributes from published guidelines for evaluating health surveillance systems. We identified 11 EEBS's and 20 evaluations of these EEBS's. The number of published evaluations per EEBS ranged from 1 (Gen-Db, GODsN, MiTAP) to 8 (GPHIN, HealthMap). The median number of evaluation variables assessed per EEBS was 8 (range, 3-15). Ten published evaluations contained quantitative assessments of at least one key variable. No evaluations examined usefulness by identifying specific public health decisions, actions, or outcomes resulting from EEBS outputs. Future EEBS assessments should identify and discuss critical indicators of public health utility, especially the impact of EEBS's on public health response.