Get Started with Disease Surveillance
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain disease surveillance.
- Identify the main challenges in disease surveillance and their impact on public health response.
- Describe how Disease Surveillance for Salesforce helps with each stage.
- Explain the role of Agentforce.
What’s Disease Surveillance?
Imagine you work at a local public health agency. You notice several foodborne illness cases linked to the same neighborhood, or a sudden spike in vaccine-preventable respiratory infections clustered at a daycare. You need to move fast to find the source, stop the spread, and protect your community.
You gather the data and tools to detect health threats in real time. As soon as information becomes available—from patient records, lab reports, or community surveys—you start looking for patterns. You trace contacts, identify sources, issue alerts, and organize a coordinated response. This is what disease surveillance is about.
Disease surveillance is a core function of public health. Agencies track more than a hundred notifiable diseases that pose risks to population health. Without surveillance, outbreaks can go undetected. Responses are slower. Preventable diseases cost more to treat and can overwhelm the system. Investing in modern disease surveillance tools isn’t just about improving data, it’s about saving lives.
What to Watch and How to Catch It
Disease surveillance goes beyond tracking individual cases. It’s about understanding patterns across populations, catching early signs, preventing spread, and guiding rapid, data-driven responses.
Public health teams keep a constant watch over a wide range of disease threats, including:
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Respiratory diseases like influenza, COVID-19, and tuberculosis are monitored for seasonal spikes and emerging variants.
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Foodborne illnesses such as Salmonella, E. coli, and cholera often signal contaminated sources and require swift outbreak tracing.
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Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and bloodborne diseases, including chlamydia, syphilis, HIV, and Hepatitis B/C depend on ongoing surveillance to guide prevention and treatment.
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Vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough are tracked to measure immunization coverage and catch signs of reemergence.
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Zoonotic diseases, like rabies, Lyme Disease, and Zika cross between animals and humans and demand coordinated monitoring across sectors.
To stay ahead of emerging threats, agencies use several complementary types of surveillance.
Surveillance Type |
What It Does |
Example |
|---|---|---|
Passive |
Collects reports from providers and labs. |
A clinic reports flu cases to the local health department. |
Active |
Seeks out cases through outreach and investigation. |
A team interviews restaurant patrons during a norovirus outbreak. |
Sentinel |
Monitors trends at select, high-quality reporting sites. |
Weekly flu surveillance from participating hospitals. |
Syndromic |
Analyzes early symptom data to flag potential outbreaks. |
ER visits for cough and fever trigger alerts for COVID. |
Environmental |
Tracks pathogens in water, air, or waste. |
Testing wastewater for virus levels or mosquitoes for West Nile. |
Each method provides a different lens. Together, they build a fuller picture that supports quicker detection, better targeting of resources, and ultimately, stronger protection for communities.
Challenges in Disease Surveillance
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many public health agencies to adopt digital tools faster than ever. But these changes often happened under pressure, leaving major gaps in functionality and coordination.
Today, many surveillance systems still rely on outdated processes. These slow things down, just when speed and accuracy matter most. Here are some of the biggest obstacles agencies face.
Challenge |
What It Means |
|---|---|
Delayed Data Access |
Many case reports still come in by fax, paper forms, or scanned documents, which delays access to data. That delay can cost valuable time during fast-moving outbreaks. |
Fragmented Systems |
Labs, hospitals, and agencies often work in disconnected systems. A lab result might go to one place while patient details stay in another. |
Heavy Workload, Small Teams |
Public health teams handle a flood of incoming reports, often manually. The backlog slows down investigations and response times. |
Limited Real-Time Insight |
Static tools like spreadsheets don’t surface trends or trigger alerts in real time. That means missed chances to catch early signals of an outbreak. |
Limited Community Engagement |
Without modern communication tools, agencies struggle to deliver fast, clear updates to the public or frontline providers during an outbreak. |
These challenges don’t just slow down the response—they risk letting outbreaks spread unchecked. Let’s look at how Disease Surveillance can help you overcome them.
The Core Capabilities
Disease Surveillance is a complete solution that helps public health agencies collect, analyze, and act on data fast.
Here’s what it offers.
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Real-time data integration: Pull data from electronic lab reports (ELR), electronic case reports (ECR), and community health records as soon as they’re available.
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Intelligent case management: Automatically create cases, detect duplicates, classify status, and guide investigators through interviews, contact tracing, and workflows.
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Dashboards and analytics: Spot clusters early, visualize outbreaks, and act before trends escalate.
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Interoperability and compliance: Use a data model based on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to ensure compatibility with reporting standards and partner systems.
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Community engagement: Send targeted health alerts and education through email, text, and social media.
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Stakeholder collaboration: Streamline coordination between agencies, healthcare providers, labs, and more.
With these tools, public health agencies can overcome the many challenges of disease surveillance.
The Main Stages
Disease surveillance consists of five key stages: intake, investigation, analysis, reporting, and outreach.
With Salesforce Disease Surveillance, every stage is faster, smarter, and more connected. This table shows how.
Stage |
Description |
How Disease Surveillance Helps |
|---|---|---|
Intake |
Agencies receive case alerts from providers, labs, or faxes. Intake specialists validate and log cases. |
Automatic case creation: Convert incoming lab reports into case records. Eliminate reentry from paper or faxes. Case deduplication: Identify duplicate cases of the same disease in a patient. Prevent redundant records, and ensure accurate case counts. |
Investigation |
Investigators analyze case details, interview patients, and conduct contact tracing. Field inspectors perform onsite evaluations and collect specimens for laboratory testing. |
Case classification: Assign cases to the correct disease status. Case assignment: Route cases to the appropriate investigators based on skillset, expertise, and availability. Investigator console: Centralize all case data for streamlined investigations.
Standardized assessments: Ask the right questions with customizable disease-specific questionnaires. Case inspections: Create and manage environmental health inspection visits to keep water, food, land, and air in the community safe. Nonhuman labs: Link laboratory test results from environmental or food specimens to case records. |
Analysis |
Epidemiologists spot patterns, assess exposure, and flag emerging outbreaks. |
Exposure assessment: Identify common sources of infection for further investigation.
Real-time dashboards: Visualize epidemiological curves, evolving case clusters, and hotspots. Predictive alerts: Automatically flag anomalies and potential outbreaks for early intervention. |
Reporting |
Agencies report findings in standardized formats to local, state, and national authorities. |
Automated reports: Generate smart summaries with key exposure data. Standards alignment: Maintain compliance with reporting frameworks like FHIR. |
Outreach |
Agencies share findings with policymakers, healthcare providers, and the public. Targeted campaigns inform communities about risks and prevention strategies. |
Omnichannel outreach: Deliver health education and advisories via email, text, and social media. Community portals: Enable self-service case reporting and real-time updates. |
Case deduplication functionality will be generally available in the Winter ’26 release.
In short, you automate case intake, accelerate investigations, enable real-time reporting, and detect outbreaks early, reducing manual work, costs, and response time. But there’s one more way to take this even further: adding intelligence and automation to lighten the load on every role.
Agentforce for Disease Surveillance
Beyond connecting your existing teams, Disease Surveillance introduces a new kind of teammate: the Public Health Agent, powered by Agentforce. This AI-driven assistant works behind the scenes to reduce manual effort and strengthen your ability to respond. Here’s the additional support you get at every stage of the surveillance process.
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Intake: Converts incoming reports automatically–whether fax, email, ELR, or ECR–into structured case records and flags potential duplicates before they slow things down.
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Investigation: Helps classify cases and generate disease-specific forms to ensure interviews and assessments capture the correct data.
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Analysis: transforms epidemiologists’ disease detective work by connecting the dots across cases, contacts, and exposures, identifying likely sources and patterns.
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Reporting: Gathers and organizes case information so it’s ready for regulatory submission and public dashboards.
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Outreach: Summarizes key updates and prepares clear, timely messages for outreach teams.
Modern disease surveillance is no longer just about collecting data. It’s about using that data to make timely, informed decisions that protect public health. In the next unit, follow a real-world scenario that shows how everything comes together. From the first case report to community outreach, find out how your expanded team, including Agentforce, helps streamline every step.