Tracking Disease Before the Outbreak

The primary challenge, and I think this is the main challenge in health IT in general, is the constant variation and change in clinical vocabulary. Also, maintaining systems like these requires constant monitoring, and fundamentally, it takes resources to become sustainable. If you don’t build these processes into larger systems where multiple people can benefit from the infrastructure, it’s not clear how you can sustain it. The volume of the data isn’t the issue, but getting knowledge out of it requires semantic interoperability, and that is where the real challenge lies.