ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2018. 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 2018 Conference Abstracts

Using an Open GIS Framework and Epidemiological 
Intelligence for Dengue Surveillance
Ta-Chien Chan*1, Bo-Cheng Lin1, Chiao-Ling Kuo1 and Li-hsiang Chiang2
1Academia Sinica, Taipei City, Taiwan; 2Public Health Bureau, Pingtung County Government, Pingtung County, Taiwan

Objective
In this paper we designed one cross-platform surveillance system 

to assist dengue fever surveillance, outbreak investigation and risk 
management of dengue fever.

Introduction
In the 2015 dengue outbreak in Taiwan, 43,784 people were 

infected and 228 died, making it the nation’s largest outbreak ever. 
Facing the increasing threat of dengue, the integration of health 
information for prevention and control of outbreaks becomes very 
important. Based on past epidemics, the areas with higher incidence 
of dengue fever are located in southern Taiwan. Without a smart and 
integrated surveillance system, the information on case distribution, 
high risk areas, mosquito surveillance, flooding areas and so on is 
fragmented. The first-line public health workers need to check all 
this information through different systems manually. When outbreaks 
occurred, paper-based outbreak investigation forms had to be 
prepared and filled in by public health workers. Then, they needed to 
enter part of this information into Taiwan CDC’s system. Duplicated 
work occurred and cost lots of labor time during the epidemic period. 
Therefore, we choose one rural county, Pingtung County, with scarce 
financial resources, to set up a new dengue surveillance system.

Methods
We designed a web-based cross-platform system based on an 

open geographical information system (GIS) framework including 
Openlayers, Javascript, PHP, MySQL and open data from government 
open data in Taiwan. There were seven epidemiological intelligence 
functions within the system including risk management, outbreak 
investigation, planning controlled areas, intelligent detection of high-
risk areas, useful tools for decision making, historical epidemics, and 
system management. The website was developed by responsive web 
design which can let public health workers check information and fill 
in the investigation form by any devices.

Results
The system was promptly set up in June 2016. With first-line 

public health workers’ efforts and the help of the surveillance system, 
there were no indigenous dengue fever cases after the system was 
implemented. There were sporadic imported cases from south-
east Asia. The dengue surveillance system achieved three major 
improvements: integration of all decision support information; 
digitalization and automation of outbreak investigation; and planning 
the control areas. The results on outbreak investigation and mosquito 
surveillance can directly transfer to Taiwan CDC’s database by Web 
Application Programming Interface (API). It can avoid duplicated 
work for disease surveillance.

Conclusions
Through introducing the new dengue surveillance system into 

local health departments, first-line public health workers can update 
all epidemic information at the same time. During epidemic periods, 
it can provide demographic, epidemiological, environmental, and 
entomological information for decision making. During non-epidemic 

periods, it can highlight the high risk areas for enhanced surveillance 
to reduce the risk of outbreaks.

Keywords
GIS; Risk management; Outbreak control; Open data; Geocoding

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from National Health Research 
Institute, Taiwan.

References
Duncombe J, Clements A, Hu W, Weinstein P, Ritchie S, Espino FE: 

Geographical Information Systems for Dengue Surveillance. The 
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 2012, 86(5):753-
755.

Hernández-Ávila JE, Rodríguez M-H, Santos-Luna R, Sánchez-Castañeda 
V, Román-Pérez S, Ríos-Salgado VH, Salas-Sarmiento JA: Nation-
Wide, Web-Based, Geographic Information System for the Integrated 
Surveillance and Control of Dengue Fever in Mexico. PLoS One 2013, 
8(8):e70231.

*Ta-Chien Chan
E-mail: dachianpig@gmail.com

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 10(1):e66, 2018