Disease Surveillance and Mapping Project in Bostwana

PING has equipped health care workers at 16 facilities in the Chobe District of Northern Botswana with HP Palm Pre 2 smart phones. Healthcare workers received training to use the mobile devices to collect malaria data and upload reports, audio, and video. The phones allow facilities to submit regular reports back to the Ministry of Health (MoH) and give health workers the ability to report real-time disease outbreak data, tag the data with GPS coordinates, and issue SMS disease outbreak alerts to all other healthcare workers in the area.

This enables Health Ministry officials to:

• promptly collect and analyse context-aware data on malarial outbreaks;
• track developments in real time using GPS coordinates;
• rapidly help to suppress the spread of malaria;
• quickly dispatch medicines and mosquito nets; and
• monitor treatments and accumulate lifesaving research data.

According to HP, this system has taken the reporting and analysis process between Chobe facilities and the Ministry of Health, which usually takes from 3 to 5 weeks to process, and reduces it to a matter of a few minutes. The data is then aggregated in real-time on the backend and graphs and reports are generated in a matter of seconds.

Malaria

According to the project, there have been a total of 1,068 real-time notifications and updates on disease patterns to Ministry of Health officials and health care workers. Eighty-nine potential malaria outbreaks have been identified in Botswana’s Chobe region, where the disease surveillance system was first piloted and rolled out. HP and PING have large-scale expansion plans for the programme including an additional 20 facilities in Botswana with over 100 health workers trained by June 1 2012, an added 80 facilities by October 2012, and the surveillance of other diseases, beginning with multi-drug resistance tuberculosis in August 2012. PING also plans to develop a self-training game tutorial to complement the reporting and mapping interface running on the phones, designed to empower health care workers to complete self-paced training on use of the mobile tools.

HP and its partners were awarded the GBCHealth Business Action on Health Award today in the Partnership/Collective Action category.