Evalucition on automatic early warning information system of important infectious disease in Yinchuan city

Objective To evaluate the operation and applicatiion of automatic early warning information system for infectious disease in Yinchuan city.Methods The information collected by the system in 2009 were analyzed and a field study was conducted to evaluate the timeliness,the sensitivity,and the validity of the early warning information.Results There were 1 129 early warnings for infectious disease in 2009 for the city from the system.Among the warnings,67(5.93%) were suspected epidemics and 62(5.4%) were confirmed as infectious disease epidemics among populations by field epidemiologic investigation.The average interval time from the system sending out the warning to the reporting of abnormal status was 0.82 hour and 98.51%(66/67) of the warnings were checked with field investination within 12 hours.The sensitivity of the system was 94.04% and the positive rate for all early warnings was only 5.6%.Conclusion The automatic early warning information system for infectious disease in Yinchun city has good timeliness and sensitivity but its validity needs to be improved.