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In early September, Dagbladet reported on several challenges related to the registration of infection cases and outbreaks from the National Institute of Public Health. In their latest risk assessment, they write that monitoring the epidemic must be improved as soon as possible.
“Surveillance of the epidemic should be improved as soon as possible so that outbreaks are detected early and the local and national situation can be understood. It requires faster and easier notification to the MSIS (Infectious Disease Notification System) in the sense that notification can be sent directly from physicians’ electronic patient record system, “writes the National Institute of Public Health and continues:
“In addition, municipal chief doctors must be able to disseminate data from their digital infection detection tools to the National Institute of Public Health, and the National Public Health Institute must present municipal chief doctors daily or weekly updated indicators of the epidemic of their municipalities “.
I want speed
Last week, Director Camilla Stoltenberg of the National Institute of Public Health told Dagbladet that they hope to accelerate work on improving alert systems.
– There are several challenges associated with our notification systems, as we have described. We are working on this now, and we hope to accelerate it when you see how important it is day by day. This is something that worried the National Institute of Public Health for a long time, even before the pandemic, Stoltenberg told Dagbladet, continuing:
– Now we have to encourage doctors, hospitals and municipalities to personally monitor this closely. We hope that we will automate electronic solutions for this as soon as possible.
Tracing
The risk assessment states that infection control surveillance has been characterized for many years by a large digital lag, but that there have been significant improvements since the start of the pandemic, allowing FHI to submit weekly reports that are found ” among the best in Europe “.
However, there is a need to improve monitoring and ensure good cooperation between the municipality and the NIPH.
The National Institute of Public Health has identified the greatest challenges and cautions that, in general, they give municipal chief doctors and the NIPH insufficient opportunity to capture signals and understand the situation. The reasons for the shortcomings are partly technical and partly legal.
The challenges
Here is the list of the biggest challenges right now:
- Laboratories should call municipal chiefs about each positive response rather than having these responses communicated electronically from the laboratories or from the national MSIS laboratory database.
- The physicians who have requested the samples receive the responses electronically from the laboratories, but cannot send electronic messages directly from the medical record system to the MSIS with detailed data on the patients’ infection conditions. Clinicians must log in to a separate page to send or mail the message. Furthermore, there are ambiguities regarding the messages from the test stations where the requesting physician does not necessarily have enough information to complete the message.
- Municipal chief doctors who have digital infection detection tools do not receive positive test results directly from them, nor can they transmit data from these tools to MSIS.
- Municipal chief doctors cannot read data in the MSIS about cases in their own municipality.
- The presentation of current statistics for the municipality itself from the MSIS and other systems is not sufficiently available for municipal chief doctors.
- Electronic registration in the SYSVAK vaccination registry should be possible from more places than health stations and GP offices so that we get a quick national overview during the deployment of the vaccination campaign against covid-19. The SYSVAK data must be able to be quickly connected to the MSIS data so that we can measure the effect of vaccination.
