About This Project

Health Protection Surveillance Centre

Development of the HPSC Infectious Diseases Monitoring Hub

Client Overview:

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) is Ireland’s specialist service for the surveillance of communicable diseases. HPSC is part of the Health Service Executive and works in partnership with health service providers and sister organisations in Ireland and around the world, to provide the best possible information for the control and prevention of infectious diseases.

Task:

The mission of the HPSC is to improve the health of the Irish population by provision of the best possible information on disease and infectious diseases through surveillance and independent advice. One of the key responsibilities of the HPSC is the surveillance of some of the major communicable diseases i.e., collecting, collating, analysing data and communicating information to internal staff, public health teams and the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the HPSC was involved in the development of the public COVID-19 Data Hub. The success of this information platform led to the HPSC changing the way they communicate information with the public. To build on this success, the HPSC required a specialist data analytics and data communication skillset to design and manage a new set of data hubs that would enable the visualisation of nearly eighty notifiable diseases – respiratory, gastroenteric to sexually transmitted diseases.

Approach:

The development of a clear understanding of the wide range of specialist datasets within the HPSC was a critical first step for the data and analytics team at People and Place. By becoming heavily involved in a cross organisational project team (comprising epidemiologists, data scientists, data visualisation specialists, statisticians, and the communications manager) our analysts were able to develop a clear data strategy that resulted in custom workflow to bring aggregated data from HPSC’s Computerised Infectious Disease Reporting system to a public visualisation and communication platform.

Results:

National Notifiable Disease Hub is a collection of dashboards displaying data on trends and key epidemiological features for notifiable infectious diseases reported in Ireland. The hub offers users trend analysis and other key epidemiological features not previously available in HPSC’s weekly infectious disease reports. The hub will improve the readability of data for users, create efficiencies by dynamically displaying data, and give users access to the underlying aggregate data. The hub includes features such as statistical measures to compare the current week’s data with comparable data from earlier time periods, and filtering capacity to display data by disease group e.g. respiratory diseases, and vaccine-preventable diseases.