Thinking out of the box: revisiting health surveillance based on medical records.

Despite the considerable advances in the last years, the health information systems for health surveillance still need to overcome some critical issues so that epidemic detection can be performed in real time. For instance, despite the efforts of the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) to make COVID-19 data available during the pandemic, delays due to data entry and data availability posed an additional threat to disease monitoring. Here, we propose a complementary approach by using electronic medical records (EMRs) data collected in real time to generate a system to enable insights from the local health surveillance system personnel.

Impact on mortality of being seropositive for hepatitis C virus antibodies among blood donors in Brazil: A twenty-year study.

Introduction: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major health problem associated with considerable risk of mortality in different regions of the world. The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of HCV infection on all-cause and liver-related mortality, in a large cohort of blood donors in Brazil.

Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of blood donors from 1994 to 2013, at Fundação Pró-Sangue-Hemocentro de São Paulo (FPS).