INDUSTRY WATCH
At the recent eIDSR National Rollout
Review event in the Port Loko
district, health facility workers and
representatives from eHA, CDC and
WHO convened to assess the extent to
which the rollout objectives had been
achieved thus far. While speaking at
the event, eHA’s Executive Director
Evelyn Castle expressed her delight
and emphasised that the system would
be closely linked to Sierra Leone’s
Front Line Field Epidemiology Training
Program (FETP).
At the event, Castle stated: “We have
been working with the Ministry of
Health and WHO for the last few
months on implementing a new
electronic way to submit disease
surveillance information. Instead of
only submitting information from
the district level, we are looking at
collecting information from the health
facility level”.
Collecting data at the health facility
level would ensure that community-
level health issues are captured. It also
increases the accuracy of population-
wide health information. Thus, this
approach better supports the district’s
ability to understand the needs of the
multiple communities located within
their district. When the information
is ultimately provided to the national
level, this allows for a more accurate,
detailed and timely assessment of
disease prevalence nationwide. This
information can then be used to make
near real-time decisions about any
potential disease outbreak.
Healthcare workers can now use the
eIDSR app to submit weekly case
reports of the standard 44 WHO priority
diseases, conditions, and public health
threats – including cases of diseases
such as malaria and cholera. The eIDSR
app is operational at all District Health
Management Teams (DHMTs) across
the country. It is currently being piloted
in six community health facilities within
the Port Loko
district to ensure
that granular
area level data
is as accurate as
possible before
being consolidated
at the DHMT level,
through to the
national level.
It is also the
ambition of
eHA for mobile
applications and
a future admin
interface to be
open-sourced and
thus available
to the DHIS2
community and
general public. The
admin interface
will enable other
organisations and
countries to use
the application
and adapt it to
their specific
needs without any
specific software
DHIS2 is currently used in 47 (predominantly
African) countries across four continents. It’s a
tool for collection, validation, analysis and
presentation of aggregate statistical data, tailored
to integrate health information management
activities. The DHIS2 analytics and reporting
functions utilise a dashboard interface to develop
graphic and comprehensive insights into the state
of public health across Sierra Leone. DHIS2 allows
thousands of concurrent users and hundreds
of millions of data records using only a single,
standard web server.
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development knowledge.
Castle concluded: “eIDSR is a great
example of taking a proven set
of guidelines and modifying the
implementation methodology to be as
effective as possible in remote and hard
to reach areas.”
Photo by Les de Wit
The system has been demonstrated as an
appropriate platform for mobile reporting within
the healthcare industry previously and has been
used in Zambia since 2011 to monitor health
interventions, improve malaria surveillance and
speed up data access. The data capture allows for
easier identification of regional trends and quicker
response to case detection to help avoid wider-
spread infections. Data can also be accessed by other
users of DHIS2 in other national health programmes
for wide-spread information and is plotted on a map
using GIS, helping to determine hotspots.
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