Syndromic surveillance in the United Arab Emirates

Opportunities for innovation in view of three complex problems faced by the UAE health care providers are described. The information dissemination problem faced could be approached by creating new channels for providing the population with public health information. These channels are precisely the ones typically used in so-called syndromic surveillance, including care-related data from communicable disease spread indicators, but also tweets and blog posts, for example. Syndromic surveillance could likewise assist the health authorities in addressing the knowledge elicitation problem: how to get more information on the life style, self care, and prevention among individual citizens. To some extent the prediction problem — how to predict the spread of infectious disease in the future and how to mathematically model social behaviour in the case of various health-threatening scenarios — would also be addressed by syndromic surveillance. Fully employed, the solutions proposed would provide new ICT services enabling preparedness for many forms of communicable disease outbreaks, as well as for natural disasters.