Toward an Agentic AI Approach to Public Health Data Collection

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems

[Submitted on 22 Oct 2026]

Title:Toward an Agentic AI Approach to Public Health Data Collection

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Disease surveillance increasingly integrates automated data collection, yet predefined sources and procedures require manual adaptation as reporting practices change. We explore agentic artificial intelligence (AI) as an approach to coordinating surveillance data collection across heterogeneous sources. Specifically, we built a multi-agent framework that integrates source discovery, source assessment, evidence structuring, event linking, and validation. Three retrospective applications illustrate its promise. The workflow recovered all 13 individual cases in a hantavirus outbreak, with links to 85 distinct publisher domains compared with 28 in the reference benchmark, reconstructed Canadian measles counts with a final total 0.33% below the national reference and higher cumulative counts on 79.8% of comparable days, and increased the share of days with recent Sierra Leone mpox reports from 28.2% to 65.6% by incorporating attributed media. These demonstrations also reveal limitations in record completeness and accuracy, while prospective gains in timeliness remain untested. We envision agentic AI as a complementary layer of public health data infrastructure, coordinating evidence-linked collection under surveillance goals and standards defined by public health professionals.

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