Overview

As defined in its 2022 flagship publication Defining Collaborative Surveillance, collaborative surveillance (CS) is defined as the systematic strengthening of capacity and collaboration among diverse stakeholders, both within and beyond the health sector, with the ultimate goal of enhancing public health intelligence and improving evidence for decision-making. It has three main objectives: strengthened national integrated disease, threat and vulnerability surveillance; increased laboratory capacity for pathogen and genomic surveillance; and collaborative approaches for risk assessment, event detection and response monitoring.

Collaborative surveillance can strengthen surveillance through two ways: (1) increasing capacity (e.g. expanding each individual bubble), and (2) increasing collaboration (e.g. creating and strengthening individual links across bubbles). The illustration of collaborative surveillance in Fig. 1 visualizes this concept. This essential connection builds efficiencies in the system through various ways, such as harmonization of ways of working, interoperability of systems, cross-workforce capabilities and, where appropriate, multi-pathogen technologies. System enhancements can be added when capacities and collaborations reach certain levels of maturity to meet the specific country-level needs.