Abstract Background Infectious disease outbreaks in communities can be controlled by early detection and effective prevention measures. Assessing the relative importance of each individual community member with respect to these two processes requires detailed knowledge about the underlying social contact network on which the disease can spread. However, mapping social contact networks is typically too resource-intensive to be a practical possibility for most communities and institutions. Methods Here, we describe a simple, low-cost method - called collocation ranking - to assess individual importance for early detection and targeted intervention strategies that are easily implementable in practice. The method is based on knowledge about individual collocation which is readily available in many community settings such as schools, offices, hospitals, and so on. We computationally validate our method in a school setting by comparing the outcome of the method against computational predictions based on outbreak simulations on an empirical high-resolution contact network. We compare collocation ranking to other methods for assessing the epidemiological importance of the members of a population. To this end, we select subpopulations of the school population by applying these assessment methods to the population and adding individuals to the subpopulation according to their individual rank. Then, we assess how suited these subpopulations are for early detection and targeted intervention strategies. Results Likelihood and timing of infection during an outbreak are important features for early detection and targeted intervention strategies. Subpopulations selected by the collocation ranking method show a substantially higher average infection probability and an earlier onset of symptoms than randomly selected subpopulations. Furthermore, these subpopulations selected by the collocation ranking method were close to the optimum. Conclusions Our results indicate that collocation ranking is a highly effective method to assess individual importance, providing critical low-cost information for the development of sentinel surveillance systems and prevention strategies.