Snow Disease Surveillance System Study

University Hospital of North Norway

Status: Completed

Conditions: Communicable Diseases

Treatments: Other: Online disease surveillance data access

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01232686

ID 3746/ HST954-10

Details and patient eligibility

About

The study investigates whether shared online access to epidemiological data for general practitioners, disease prevention officers, emergency care services and microbiology laboratories changes clinical practice with regard to testing, diagnosing and treatment of communicable diseases. The main hypothesis is that "online access for general practitioner to epidemiological data about communicable diseases changes clinical practice for testing, diagnosing and treatment of communicable diseases".

Full description

We will collect data from general practitioners (GP) offices by installing local data extraction solutions. Each installation will build a local anonymous database of GP consultations extracted from the local electronic patient record (EPR) system. These anonymous data records will be used to produce local disease statistics before they are exported to a centralized server available in the Norwegian Health network. The centralized server will produce daily reports about the epidemiological situation in the patient population. We will combine the syndromic data from the GP offices with data from the microbiology laboratories on the hospitals that covers the study areas. The epidemiological data will be made available to the intervention areas in the study through web based and customized client applications.

By using data extracted from the GP offices EPR databases and the microbiology laboratories we will investigate the study hypothesis.

Enrollment: 200 estimated patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Volunteering General Practitioner (GP) working in a GP office

Exclusion criteria

• The GP does not use a Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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200 participants in 2 patient groups

Control area

No Intervention group

Description:

In the control areas we will monitor the prevalence and treatment of communicable diseases without giving the participants online access to disease surveillance information

Intervention area

Experimental group

Description:

In these areas we will give study participants online access to epidemiological data for communicable diseases

Treatment:

Other: Online disease surveillance data access