Pharmacy Surveillance – Analytical Services

The Centre of Food-Borne, Environmental and Zoonotic Infectous Diseases (CFEZID), on behalf of the Public Health Agency of Canada, manages the Pharmacy-based Surveillance System.  Pharmacy-based syndromic surveillance uses sales of pharmaceuticals to identify trends that can represent increases in illness in the population served earlier than traditional methods of illness surveillance. Pharmacy-based syndromic surveillance has been demonstrated to be effective in its capacity to: detect community-wide seasonal outbreaks, pinpoint specific areas of increased sales activity and provide information to initiate an investigation leading to the identification of cases that otherwise may have remained undetected.

The Executive Committee approved the continuation and funding of the project for an additional 2 years however (end date March 31, 2015). The contract supporting the management and administration of the system of real-time national surveillance of respiratory and enteric syndromes (2012-13) concluded on March 31, 2013.  A contract for the purchase of daily pharmacy sales data took effect on November 15, 2013 and a long-form contract is in place as an interim measure for the analysis of data to assist FluWatch in the surveillance of seasonal influenza while a Request for Proposals (RFP) for analytical capacity for pharmacy surveillance undergoes review and posting. 

The analytical component is integral to the pharmacy surveillance system. PHAC requires the services of an individual or company with significant expertise in statistics, analytical and modeling techniques, pharmacy syndromic surveillance data and outbreak detection to  meet the requirements.  The requested resources will enable this early warning system to be maintained and enhanced over the subsequent 18 months during implementation of the Agency’s Surveillance Strategic Plan. 

MT1-The proponent must clearly demonstrate within their proposal a minimum of three (3) projects in the past ten (10) years in:
•Writing and implementing aberration detection algorithms and methods
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.

MT2-The proponent must clearly demonstrate within their proposal a minimum of five (5) projects in the past ten (10) years in:
•Conducting epidemiological studies using health informatics; 
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.

MT3-The proponent must clearly show within their proposal a minimum of three (3) projects within the past ten (10) years:
•Analyzing real-time pharmacy sales data and/or the equivalent experience in real-time health data
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.
MT4-The proponent must clearly demonstrate within their proposal a minimum of three (3) projects in the past ten (10) years which required:
•The collection, synthesis and secure storage of data (password protection, encryption)
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.

MT5-The bidder must clearly demonstrate within their proposal at least three (3) projects in the last ten (10) years:
•Developing data quality management and assurance protocols (eg. dashboards) for the purpose of evaluating the integrity of daily data.
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.

MT6-The proponent must have a minimum of five (5) projects in the last ten (10) years conducting research projects entailing large complex databases of health information.
*Please provide references and their contact information for each project as they may be contacted for verification.