Managing Emerging Infectious Diseases with Information Systems: Reconceptualizing Outbreak Management Through the Lens of Loose Coupling
Authors: Chen, Yi-Da; Brown, Susan A.; Hu, Paul Jen-Hwa; King, Chwan-Chuen; Chen, Hsinchun
Journal: Information Systems Research (2011)
<jats:p> Increasing global connectivity makes emerging infectious diseases (EID) more threatening than ever before. Various information systems (IS) projects have been undertaken to enhance public health capacity for detecting EID in a timely manner and disseminating important public health information to concerned parties. While those initiatives seemed to offer promising solutions, public health researchers and practitioners raised concerns about their overall effectiveness. In this paper, we argue that the concerns about current public health IS projects are partially rooted in the lack of a comprehensive framework that captures the complexity of EID management to inform and evaluate the development of public health IS. We leverage loose coupling to analyze news coverage and contact tracing data from 479 patients associated with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Taiwan. From this analysis, we develop a framework for outbreak management. Our proposed framework identifies two types of causal circles—coupling and decoupling circles—between the central public health administration and the local capacity for detecting unusual patient cases. These two circles a…