Abstract:
Objectives To develop an evaluation package for China's National Notifiable Disease Reporting System, and provide support to improve the efficiency and quality of infectious disease reporting.
Methods The evaluation system was established based on six dimensions: timeliness of case reporting, timeliness of information verification, information completeness, information accuracy, validity of identity card code and key disease alerts. The R-based program package survalarm was developed accordingly. A retrospective analysis was conducted on the information of infectious disease reports from healthcare institutions in Jiangjin district, Chongqing, during 2018-2023 to evaluate survalarm's performance in terms of processing efficiency and verification accuracy.
Results The core function epiaudit() completed 30 repeated tests on the dataset, with an average execution time of 179.25±10.02( \overlinex ±s)seconds, achieving a processing throughput of 427.03 reports/s, indicating a 4 270.30-fold efficiency improvement compared with manual verification (0.10 reports/s). In the gold-standard dataset, survalarm showed a sensitivity of 98.85% (95% CI: 93.28% - 100.00%), specificity of 99.58% (95% CI: 98.75% - 99.86%), positive predictive value of 96.63% (95% CI: 90.51% - 98.96%), and a F1-score of 97.73% (95% CI: 94.18% - 99.42%). From 2018 to 2023, the healthcare institutions in Jiangjin reported 76 545 valid cards of infectious disease cases, with timelessness rate, completeness rate, accuracy rate, and identity card code validity rate of 99.96%, 98.37%, 97.11%, and 95.12%, respectively. Four types of incomplete reporting and 12 types of inaccurate reporting were identified. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the count of infectious disease online reporting cards and manual verifying error rate was 0.33 in Jiangjin health care institutions from 2018 to 2023 (P=0.004).
Conclusion There was an association between high workload in manual infectious disease verifying and increased errors. Survalarm demonstrated good evaluation performance, which can effectively reduce human resources and improve the efficiency of evaluation of reported infectious disease information.