ECDC Contacts and Organizations Database - a European Inventory in a Public Health Setting

For its daily activities, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) requests high quality work in the field of country relations. In order to reach this goal, it has been identified the crucial need of creating a database with relevant, updated and reliable information about the contacts and organizations in the Member States. The ECDC Contacts and Organizations Database (ECO DB) is the consequence of the decision that all the ECDC contacts have to be on a common database in order to avoid duplications, overlapping and to increase the quality in the communication with the ECDC's stakeholders. The ECO DB is a central point integrated with Identity Management and all the in-house information systems, and it stores all the contact data. At the same time it represents an European public health country inventory that provides high quality and easy to access information on all relevant aspects for ECDC.
Two years ago, ECDC decided to adopt Microsoft CRM as the IT product used to create the ECO DB. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term applied to processes implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers. In ECDC, the CRM software is used to support these processes and to store information on partners. All information in the system is both accessed and entered by staff from the different units. It is easy to implement, and to connect to other products used in ECDC, such as Word, Excel, SharePoint, ILM and any SQL database.
CRM provides a competitive set of functionalities: tracking the email exchange with all ECDC contacts, contacts ownership and update processes, integration with other in-house systems (Identity Management, the European Surveillance System, Epi network, Threats Track Tool, Web Portal, Terminology Server, etc.). These functionalities make CRM to be an excellent tool for contacts management which improves the communication between the Member States and the ECDC.