One of the obstacles of biosurveillance is the non-standard recording and storage of contextual data. This is a problem especially when establishing a national biosurveillance program made up of different public health laboratories having differing data collection standards (e.g. each laboratory requiring or recording a different set of contextual data categories). As a result, timely submission to databases is hampered due to additional time to request additional pieces of metadata from sampling laboratories. To circumvent this problem, a need for standard contextual data collection and storage system should be in place. For this reason PHA4GE has developed a contextual data standard package.
The sections below show the process of establishing a contextual data standard for PGC Mindanao. The original PGC Mindanao workflow for the handling of contextual data is outlined (Section 2), particularly the collection of contextual data (Section 2.1), storage of contextual data (Section 2.2), stewardship of contextual data (Section 2.3), and preparation of contextual data for submission to GISAID (Section 2.4). The PHA4GE workflow for handling contextual data, as applied by PGC Mindanao is also outlined (Section 3).