From mumps and influenza to HIV and salmonella, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) is responsible for monitoring and reporting the spread of communicable diseases in Ireland.  The service had previously been involved in the development of a highly successful online data hub for tracking COVID-19 cases nationwide, later expanded to include influenza and RSV.  It wanted to build on this experience to create a similar but larger hub that would make up-to-date data on 79 of Ireland’s notifiable diseases accessible to everyone, all in one place.

Wider access to epidemiological information 
Now, for the first time, members of the public, policy makers, medical professionals and epidemiologists have an easy-to-use, single point of access to information about notifiable diseases in Ireland.  “The appetite in the general public for epidemiological information really did rise during the COVID-19 pandemic,” reflects Garvey.  “We can now respond to this heightened level of interest and give everyone easy access to data on all kinds of infectious and communicable diseases – not just COVID-19.”

Richer insight into epidemiological trends
With its customisable visualisations, the ArcGIS Hub allows users to not only see weekly figures, but also examine trends and analyse patterns.  “We are presenting a lot more timely analysis than we have done previously in our weekly pdf reports,” says Garvey.  “Using ArcGIS Hub, people can tailor their views of disease data and drill down into their own areas of interest to get a far richer insight into epidemiological trends.”

Internal efficiency savings 
Within HPSC, staff now work significantly more efficiently and save time when responding to information requests.  In the past, it could have taken employees a couple of hours or more to respond to a query, whereas now, most queries can be answered with a few clicks on the hub.  “It used to be very resource intensive to respond to queries from policy makers, the media and others,” Garvey explains.  “Now we can refer most people to the National Notifiable Disease Hub and they can find the information they are interested in for themselves.”

Faster reactions to disease outbreaks
Using the National Notifiable Disease Hub, HPSC staff can see, at a glance, if there have been sudden surges in any particular diseases and if there are areas for concern that need to be addressed promptly.  “The National Notifiable Disease Hub allows us to share analyses with colleagues on the fly, which enables much more immediate decision making,” notes Garvey.  “It helps us to respond faster to increases of norovirus, for example, which can be very disruptive to the operation of hospitals.” 

Increased public awareness of health risks
An added benefit of the hub is that it can be used to highlight public health risks.  HPSC’s communications team shares the Hub’s ArcGIS charts on its social media platforms to highlight individual diseases as part of a campaign to spread awareness of the Hub alongside health protection messages. As Garvey observes, “The National Notifiable Disease Hub is a flagship project that has really shown the organisation what we can do with GIS to benefit health and care professionals and the wider public at the same time.”