Disease & Epidemic Outbreak Surveillance

This project was made possible through the introduction of malaria rapid diagnostic tests and the availability of wirless communication networks also in remote areas, linking rural health workers to central health services. In November 2009 a RapidSMS reporting system was implemented at more than 140 clinics. The system implementation was aimed at improving data reporting and management and monitoring ACT stock availability. An evaluation of the project showed that the SMS-programme has potential to obtain critical healthcare-related data from remote areas in real time, supporting evidence-based decision-making. While there were still short-comings, timely data availability can help to make supply chain issues and monitoring of malaria diagnosis and treatment more efficient.

The use of paper-based systems for data collection hampers an effective prevention and control of infectious diseases like malaria and dengue. A mhealth platform jointly developed by researchers in the U.S. and Mexico aims to give researchers near real-time montioring capacity of mosquito-borne diseases. It enables control teams to use mobile phones to immediately transmit data from the field, allowing for rapid feedback to data collectors and effective decision-making on disease control. After developing the software the system will have to be tested in the field.

The Indus Hospital in Karachi experienced a significant increase in tuberculosis (TB) case detection following the start of a new programme in January 2011 that uses mobile phone technology and financial incentives to track down people with TB. Family doctors and community health workers are rewarded for screening patients and referring suspected cases to TB centres. They report cases using their mobile phones and receive a text message which tells them how many cases they have helped to detect. This data is used to calculate the incentives earned by each person which is then transferred via mobile banking facilities.

The partners in this project aim to move away from slow paper reports and instead equip health-care workers with mobile phones to gather malaria data and upload the information to the cloud. Workers can also tag data with a GPS coordinate, pictures, video, and audio. In case of signals for an outbreak, Ministry of Health officials and other health workers in the area will be notified in real time via text message. The 1-year pilot was launched in the beginning of 2011 and if found to be a success the aim is to expand it to all outbreak-prone diseases in Botswana.

This mHealth Partnership seeks to support a scalable, cost-effective and sustainable national health information system in Tanzania. Making use of the rapidly increasing mobile network coverage in the country, the project aims to improve the information flow across and between different health system levels, reduce the response time for critical services and improve evidence-based planning and decision making. The programme facilitates the transmission via SMS of real-time notifications of infectious disease cases as well as broader disease trends (as part of the existing Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) strategy). This allows not only for a prompt automatic generation of SMS-alerts to district, regional and national public health officials, but also frees up precious time of health facility workers.

In 2004 a public health surveillance project to lower the rate of sexually transmitted diseases was piloted. Cell phones were used for real-time collection and transmission of adverse events related to metronidazole administration among female sex workers in three cities.

Epidemiology Unit Officials in India and Sri Lanka face problems in receiving health information in a timely manner in order to prevent diseases reaching epidemic states. In this pilot project village level nurses in selected districts in India and Sri Lanka were provided with mobile phones with custom software for messaging out-patient data in a prescribed format to a central server. A decision for scaling of the project will be based on the pilot evaluation.

Epidemiology Unit Officials in India and Sri Lanka face problems in receiving health information in a timely manner in order to prevent diseases reaching epidemic states. In this pilot project village level nurses in selected districts in India and Sri Lanka were provided with mobile phones with custom software for messaging out-patient data in a prescribed format to a central server. A decision for scaling of the project will be based on the pilot evaluation.

A landline-based system for reporting the occurrence of epidemic-prone diseases was disrupted after the strong earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008. An emergency reporting system based on mobile phones was developed, using SMS to send information to a national database.

Community Service Providers (CSPs) help to bridge between patients and physician, mainly for family planning and maternal and child care services, and often at considerable distance from their parent clinic. In these pilots, mobile technology was used in two rural clinics in Bangladesh to speed-up the writing and gathering of health data and CSPs' service statistics.