An exploratory study of disease surveillance systems in Norway.

We conducted a qualitative study of the system for contagious disease surveillance in Norway. Semi-structured interviews were held with five general practitioners (GPs), including one person responsible for informing GPs in their region about potentially serious disease outbreaks. The interviews suggested that the existing system had several limitations, making it of little relevance to local epidemics or daily medical practice. Specifically, it was difficult and time-consuming for physicians to locate relevant information, and there was a substantial delay between reported diagnoses and eventual feedback about outbreaks. This resulted in information that was too old to be of value. The interviews also investigated design matters related to future realtime disease surveillance systems. The GPs expressed interest in a distributed system for realtime extraction and presentation of data from electronic record systems. They required that any such system be customizable to the specific needs of the doctor in order to be relevant in day-to-day practice, and that correct interpretation of data would be possible in the minimum of time.