Impact of Primary Health Care Data Quality on Infectious Disease Surveillance in Brazil: Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The increase in emerging and re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks underscores the need for robust early warning systems (EWSs) to guide mitigation and response measures. Administrative health care databases provide valuable epidemiological insights without imposing additional burdens on health services. However, these datasets are primarily collected for operational use, making data quality assessment essential to ensure an accurate interpretation of epidemiological analysis. This study focuses on the development and implementation of a data quality index (DQI) for surveillance integrated into an EWS for influenza-like illness (ILI) outbreaks using Brazil's a nationwide Primary Health Care (PHC) dataset. Objective: We aimed to evaluate the impact of data completeness and timeliness on the performance of an EWS for ILI outbreaks and establish optimal thresholds for a suitable DQI, thereby improving the accuracy of outbreak detection and supporting public health surveillance. Methods: A composite DQI was established to measure the completeness and timeliness of PHC data from the Brazilian National Information System on Primary Health Care. Completeness was defined as the proportion of weeks within an 8-week rolling window with any register of encounters. Timeliness was calculated as the interval between the date of encounter and its corresponding registry in the information system. The backfilled PHC dataset served as the gold standard to evaluate the impact of varying data quality levels from the weekly updated real-time PHC dataset on the EWS for ILI outbreaks across 5570 Brazilian municipalities from October 10, 2023, to March 10, 2024. Results: During the study period, the backfilled dataset recorded 198,335,762 ILI-related encounters, averaging 8,623,294 encounters per week. The EWS detected a median of 4 (IQR 2-5) ILI outbreak warnings per municipality using the backfilled dataset. Using the real-time dataset, 12,538 (65%) warnings were concordant with the backfilled dataset. Our analysis revealed that 100% completeness yielded 76.7% concordant warnings, while 80% timeliness resulted in at least 50% concordant warnings. These thresholds were considered optimal for a suitable DQI. Restricting the analysis to municipalities with a suitable DQI increased concordant warnings to 80.4%. A median of 71% (IQR 54%-71.9%) of municipalities met the suitable DQI threshold weekly. Municipalities with ≥60% of weeks achieving a suitable DQI demonstrated the highest concordance between backfilled and real-time datasets, with those achieving ≥80% of weeks showing 82.3% concordance. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the critical role of data quality in improving the EWS' performance based on PHC data for detecting ILI outbreaks. The proposed framework for real-time DQI monitoring is a practical approach and can be adapted to other surveillance systems, providing insights for similar implementations. We demonstrate that optimal completeness and timeliness of data significantly impact the EWS' ability to detect ILI outbreaks. Continuous monitoring and improvement of data quality should remain a priority to strengthen the reliability and effectiveness of surveillance systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".