From Clinical Data Warehouses to Epidemiological Indicators: A Methodology for Real-Time Surveillance

Clinical data warehouses (CDWs) provide a robust foundation for generating real-world epidemiological indicators from electronic health records. By exploiting routinely collected hospital data, these infrastructures enable near real-time monitoring of infectious diseases. Their value increases when complemented by external data streams, including web search queries or meteorological variables. Evidence from recent studies shows that combining these heterogeneous signals with statistical models, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) enhances both the timeliness and accuracy of outbreak detection and forecasting. The project aims to combine novel methods and apply them to our local CDW by considering the changes in open data.