Building an Adaptive Digital Infrastructure for Disease Surveillance and Public Health Response

Date: 13 Oct 2026 | Time: 1510 - 1530 | Venue: The NAK Auditorium, Academia (SGH Campus)

Track: Session 2.1 EPI - Contact Tracing, Data Management

Speaker:

Overview:

Effective disease surveillance requires not only robust detection capabilities, but also the digital infrastructure to translate data into coordinated and timely public health action. This presentation shares the Communicable Diseases Agency’s experience in developing an integrated, multi-modal surveillance system and the supporting digital architecture for outbreak response.

Singapore's surveillance system comprises indicator-based, event-based, laboratory, sero-epidemiological, environmental, and global surveillance, through a One Health approach. Surveillance outputs directly inform preparedness planning and response, from early risk assessment to the calibration of public health interventions. A key lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic was that fragmented IT systems were unable to meet the scale and speed demands of a major outbreak. This prompted a strategic shift away from monolithic system design towards a modular ecosystem of interoperable, fit-for-purpose applications underpinned by a coherent data architecture. The resulting platform supports end-to-end public health operations, enables seamless cross-agency data flows, and can be rapidly configured to respond to novel pathogens.