Abstract

Background: Zoonotic diseases or zoonoses account for a considerable ratio of infectious diseases outbreak; their effective surveillance demands coordinated actions by human and animal health organizations. However, zoonoses surveillance data are collected individually from standalone information systems for either humans or animals with varied structures, processes and applications. In moving towards one health (OH) surveillance, integrating the zoonoses data may help prevent and control these diseases. Therefore, this research aimed to determine essential data elements and a consistent reporting template towards interoperability. Material and methods: In this study, first, the zoonotic diseases minimum dataset (ZD-MDS) was identified according to a comprehensive literature review coupled with the agreements of experts. Then, the ZD-MDS was mapped to structured clinical vocabularies. Also, the health level seven-clinical document architecture (HL7-CDA) standard was used to define the interoperable and human-machine reporting template. Results: The ZD-MDS was divided into administrative and clinical sections with five and seven data classes and total of 38 and 57 data elements, respectively. Then, the corresponding data values and systematized nomenclature of medicine-clinical terms (SNOMED-CT) codes were defined for each data element. The reporting template was structured according to three sections of CDA template, extensible markup language (XML) hierarchical and tags. Conclusion: Our study suggested that zoonoses surveillance could be improved by integrating and exchanging data from different databases across humans and animal organizations. The developed template provided a comprehensive and interoperable dataset, making data more comparable and reportable across multiple studies and settings. © 2022