GPHIN Renewal

In light of a changing public health landscape, fuelled by the digital revolution, evolving technologies and societal changes, the Public Health Agency of Canada is currently undergoing a renewal of GPHIN to capitalise on emerging methods and technologies, expanding the volume and scope of monitored data, to facilitate risk assessment, to build storylines to frame events in their temporal, environmental and demographic contexts, and to improve timeliness of event detection and reporting. The renewal is creating a common platform for public health intelligence, unifying program areas and disparate data-sets to enhance and strengthen Canada’s health security capacity and improve the turn-around time for event detection, situational awareness and reporting.

Recognising common needs across public health areas, both for data and technology, the current renewal of the GPHIN system will create a common interactive platform that minimises duplication of cost and effort, fosters cross-sectoral collaboration, and improves event detection and assessment. The core foundational platform is currently being developed to allow further enhancements and additions in the future. This foundation will focus on the ability of the system to ingest multiple data sources, link events over time and space and provide an interactive visual interface to its membership. In parallel, GPHIN will be partnering with specific groups to target high-priority areas within public health. The architecture of the new system will allow groups to develop components that address their specific needs while capitalising on the GPHIN core system and interact with its other shared components.