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The International Society for Disease Surveillance held its eleventh
annual conference in San Diego on December 4th and 5th, 2012,
under the theme Expanding Collaborations to Chart a New Course
in Public Health Surveillance.  During these two days, practitioners
and researchers across many disciplines gathered to share best prac-
tices, lessons learned and cutting edge approaches to timely disease
surveillance.  A record number of abstracts were received, reviewed
and presented – the schedule included 99 orals, 4 panels, 94 posters,
5 roundtables and 12 system demonstrations.  Presenters represented
24 different countries from Africa, North and South America, Europe,
and Asia .  Topics covered included, but were not limited to, statisti-
cal methods for outbreak detection, border health, data quality, eval-
uation of novel data streams, influenza surveillance, best practices
and policies for information sharing, social network analysis, data
mining techniques, surveillance during weather events and mass gath-
erings, syndrome development, and novel uses of syndromic sur-
veillance data.  There were also discussions on the impact of
regulations and standards development on disease surveillance, in-
cluding Meaningful Use and the International Health Regulations.   

The 2012 Conference was also host to several exciting keynote
and plenary talks, including those given by James Fowler, Professor
of Medical Genetics and Political Science at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego and Bill Davenhall, Global manager of Esri's
Health and Human Service Solutions Group.  Plenary speakers Steve
Waterman, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC);
Simon Hay, University of Oxford; and Brian McCloskey, Health Pro-
tection Agency in London, reflected on the importance of effective
collaborations in their respective topics of migrant and border health,

malaria disease epidemiology and mass gathering health.  National
and international representatives from the CDC, the World Health
Organization and the Department of Homeland Security also dis-
cussed their respective strategic plans for disease surveillance.

In addition, the 2012 Data Visualization Event enabled conference
attendees to collaborate and gain knowledge of visualization tools and
techniques applied to a rich, de-identified set of ambulatory electronic
health record (EHR) data.  Participants developed visualizations of
chronic disease events using this common data set and presented their
work during the evening poster session.  The goals for this event were
to demonstrate and share visualization tools and techniques that at-
tendees could learn to apply to their own data and also to provide ex-
posure to data elements available in ambulatory EHR systems and
highlight their potential for surveillance and research.

My hope is that attendees of the 2012 ISDS Conference strength-
ened existing collaborations and fostered new ones, and returned to
their places of work or study energized with new ideas and ap-
proaches to disease surveillance. The challenge for all of us is to sus-
tain this new energy throughout the coming year and to leverage the
tools available to us to share best practices and reach out for assis-
tance when needed.  We all want to improve the health of our popu-
lations, and collaborations will enable us to achieve that goal.

A. Ising
Carolina Center for Health Informatics, 

Department of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA; 

2012 ISDS Scientific Program Committee Chair

ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts

2012 International Society for Disease Surveillance
Conference

Expanding Collaborations to Chart a New Course in
Public Health Surveillance

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 5(1):e1, 2013