The re-emergence of an infectious disease is dependent on social, political, behavioral, and disease-specific factors. Global disease surveillance is a requisite of early detection that facilitates coordinated interventions to these events. Novel informatics tools developed from publicly available data are constantly evolving with the incorporation of new data streams. Re-emerging Infectious Disease (RED) Alert is an open-source tool designed to help analysts develop a contextual framework when planning for future events, given what has occurred in the past.

Timely and accurate syndromic surveillance depends on continuous data feeds from healthcare facilities. Typical outlier detection methodologies in syndromic surveillance compare predictions of counts for an interval to observed event counts, either to detect increases in volume associated with public health incidents or decreases in volume associated with compromised data transmission.