Preparations continue for rollout of new public health surveillance platform in nine pilot countries
Next year’s rollout of Epi+, a multilingual event-based surveillance platform designed to help countries detect and assess emerging public health threats, is coming closer as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and Italy’s Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) hold training this week for 40 national epidemiologists and technical experts in Rome.
Epi+, developed by ECDC in coordination with EU/EEA Member States, provides countries with enhanced tools to record and assess emerging public health issues, and to coordinate information across all the national institutions involved. As most Member States do not have a dedicated digital tool to support these processes at national level, Epi+ will fill this gap. It complements and will be interoperable with EpiPulse, ECDC’s platform for sharing and discussing epidemic signals between Member States. The platform’s source code will be available to public health authorities across Europe, allowing them to adapt the tool to their national needs.
‘Epi+ will help countries share and assess information about emerging public health threats more systematically and support cooperation between all the institutions involved,’ said Vicky Lefevre, ECDC Head of Surveillance, Preparedness and Response. ‘This training is an important step towards putting the platform into practice and strengthening Europe’s ability to identify and respond to threats that may cross borders.’
‘Effective event-based surveillance depends on the ability of national experts to recognise, assess and share information about unusual public health events,’ said Anna Teresa Palamara, Director of Department of Infectious Diseases at ISS. ‘This training will help participating countries build the expertise needed to integrate Epi+ into their national surveillance activities.’
Event-based surveillance captures signals from a variety of sources such as reports of unusual clusters of illness, media reports and informal information. It complements traditional surveillance based on routinely collected data.
This week’s training brings together experts from the nine participating EU/EEA countries that will be the first to use the platform in June 2027: Croatia, Greece, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Portugal, Norway and Slovenia. The University of Oslo Health Information Systems Programme Centre (HISP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are also taking part.
