Forum 5

When epidemiology meets Big Data

Opportunities & challenges of an inevitable encounter

Organised by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)

Data - on the environment around us, on our travels, on the food we eat, on the diseases we catch, on the medicines we take, on the genes we inherit - are likely to be stored somewhere, increasingly in electronic format, and so available for analysis. Yet, most disease prevention and control strategies are guided by burdensome stand-alone notification systems and ad-hoc epidemiological studies. Transitioning to digital epidemiology requires new mindsets, including an even stronger attention to epidemiological methods and standards for information storage. For this transition to be successful, concerted strategies should be developed by involving the political, commercial, public health and societal sectors.

Public health requirements are not consistently included in eHealth policies and implemented at EU and national level. This session aims to help identify some of these requirements and inform policymakers and public health professionals through an interactive discussion among diverse experts and with input from you, the participants.

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