SurvNet@RKI--a multistate electronic reporting system for communicable diseases

In 2001, Germany implemented a new electronic reporting system for surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases (SurvNet@RKI). The system is currently being used in all 431 local health departments (LHD), the 16 state health departments (SHD) and the Robert Koch-Institut (RKI), the national agency for infectious disease epidemiology. The database is designed as a distributed, dynamic database, with an integrated version management system that documents deletion, undeletion, completion and correction of cases. RKI makes the system available to all LHDs and SHDs free of charge, receiving an average of 300,000 case reports and 6240 outbreak reports per year. A public web-based query interface, SurvStat@RKI, assures extensive and timely publication of the data. During the 5 years that SurvNet@RKI has been running in all LHDs and SHDs in Germany it has coped well with a complex federal structure which makes this system particularly attractive to multinational surveillance networks. The system is currently being migrated to Microsoft C#/.NET and transport formats in XML.