Affordable system for rapid detection and mitigation of emerging diseases

Abstract

South and South-East Asian countries are currently in the midst of a new epidemic of Dengue Fever. This paper presents disease surveillance systems in Sri Lanka and India, monitoring a handful of communicable diseases termed as notifiable. These systems typically require 15-30 days to communicate field data to the central Epidemiology Units, to be then manually processed (Prashant & Waidyanatha, 2010). Currently used analyses rely on aggregating counts of notifiable disease cases by district, disease, and week. The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP), a multi-partner initiative, aims at addressing those challenges by developing affordable paradigm-changing Information Communication Technology (ICT), implementing and field-testing them in India and Sri Lanka. Key components of the proposed solution include real-time digitization of clinical information at hospitals and clinics with the mHealthSurvey mobile phone software (Kannan et al., 2010), detecting anomalies in large multivariate biosurveillance data using the T-Cube Web Interface spatio-temporal statistical analysis tool (Ray et al., 2008), and disseminating critical information pertaining to the adverse events to healthcare workers using the Sahana Alerting Module (Sampath et al., 2010). This paper provides an overview of the applications and discusses utility of the technologies for real-time detection and mitigation of emerging threats to public health.