Establishment and efficiency evaluation of an automatic early warning system for communicable disease incident in Dalian city

Objective To establish a simple and easy method for automatic early warning for the incident of communicable diseases for early identification and management of epidemic outbreak and public health emergency.Methods An automatic early warning system for communicable disease incident in Dalian city was developed using the information on communicable disease incident report collected through internet from China Information System for Disease Control and Prevention and used for real time warning of epidemic outbreak and public health emergency in Dalian city.Results During the period from 2012 to 2013,the established system issued a total of 5 early warnings for communicable disease emergency,with the sensitivity of 71.43% and the positive prediction value of 55.56%,and a total of 256 early warnings for communicable disease outbreaks,with the sensitivity of 89.92% and the positive prediction value of 67.02%.The system established shows higher sensitivity and positive prediction value compared to the Communicable Disease Automatic Early Warning System currently used in China(χ²=409.47,P=0.0000 and χ²=2007.02,P=0.0000)Conclusion The automatic early warning system for communicable disease incident established by the study could identify communicable disease outbreak and issue real time warning using communicable disease reports through internet with higher sensitivity and positive prediction value and the system could be used more applicably at municipal or county level.