ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses research areas and public health trends that hold promise to further revolutionize public health surveillance. As information and communications technologies (ICT) continue to evolve and penetrate the global marketplace, public health surveillance and, in particular, population-based surveillance need to be agile and able to quickly adapt to incorporate new innovations. Along the lines of ICT acceptance, in the early 2000s, as electronic disease surveillance systems were in their infancy in the United States, many public health professionals were skeptical about the increased reliance on electronic data, regardless of how it was created. People investing in the research field of global health security and disease surveillance need to think about how they can benefit from this greater interconnectedness in order to provide an earlier detection of an emerging infectious disease threat. Once population-based surveillance is in place and data are routinely being collected, the question then turns to whether one can predict the outbreak of an endemic disease.
