A Mobile, Integrated Disease Surveillance System

Disease surveillance is an important aspect of any public health-care programme that serves two
essential purposes, one of which is monitoring the progress of ongoing medical interventions for
disease reduction, and the other is for the early detection of outbreaks to initiate investigative and
control measures. Disease Surveillance is also a basic tool for the field epidemiologist as surveillance
data provide a scientific basis for implementation of an appropriate health-care policy, disease control
decisions, the evaluation of the efficacy of surveillance initiatives, and for the allocation of resources in
the primary health-care system.

A critical requirement in preventing an outbreak of a communicable disease is the early detection and
investigation of such disease. Most outbreaks start in small clusters, and if detected and investigated
early, their spread could be more easily prevented or controlled.

We plan to develop an open-sourced, sustainable and efficient disease surveillance system that could
detect and respond in a timely manner. This system would run on a mobile device for accurate
collection of data, its validation at the source, and immediate transmission to a server where resident
experts could identify trends for taking informed decisions.

We believe mobile technologies can play a critical role in assisting health-care providers in delivering
timely medical response to local clusters affected by outbreaks and in containing the outbreaks to
within such local clusters. An integrated disease surveillance framework, deployed on mobile devices with rich connectivity, can assist health-care workers to effectively reach out into the remotest areas that would otherwise be left without preventive and interventional health-care.

Our objective is to present a conceptual framework for an Integrated Disease Surveillance System, that logically
replicates the manual models of disease surveillance by mapping the manual processes onto mobile devices for field data collection.

An integrated disease surveillance system is undoubtedly an important component of any e-Governance initiative
for a developing country like India. While we may create a pilot project for India, we would later like to take the framework for this Integrated Disease Surveillance programme to other countries with similar or lower levels of social and economic development as India, and customize it for local needs.

Disease Surveillance is an important aspect of any public health-care system and requires continuous monitoring and evaluation of critical indicators to help in the early detection of out-breaks. Due to globalization and increased mobility of the population, outbreaks can rapidly spread across social and cultural boundaries, geographical boundaries.

For any disease surveillance system to be successful, detection and reporting must occur in real-time so that appropriate medical interventions can be provided to isolate the outbreak to a local geographical area. Addressing social issues such local cultural practices, personal and civic hygiene, local work habits, local participation and leadership capabilities are all important for the success of the surveillance system. Obtaining local cooperation is also critical in building a self-sustaining system that can be implemented at the local level.

This also requires us define processes for regular training in hygiene, information disemmination and bench-marking to test the effectiveness of the processes.