Sentinel Site Surveillance procedures are a popular public health practice in many countries,
including Sri Lanka. Priority health data communication, case site investigations, and statical reporting are the key preliminary operations. The present day paper based procedures do not provide the much needed timeliness in completing these tasks.
The
Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) is a pilot project designed and lead by LIRNEasia. The pilot which ends in December 2010 showed promising results to the extent that the Wayamba Provincial Director of Health Services (PDHS) has expressed interest in scaling the project from a dozen hospitals to all fifty hospitals in the pilot district, with the aim of nationalizing after studying and rectifying the scalability issue. The mobile health software developed for the project was a simple application that digitized the optimal set of outpatient and inward data: case date/time, location, gender, age-group, disease, and syndrome. However, it was not designed to address the standard operating procedures of the legally mandated surveillance and notification.
Now the RTBP project is looking for external funding to enhance the RTBP developed
mHealthSurvey mobile phone software to adapt to the functional requirements of the Sentinel Site Surveillance program. This would require adding some logic in to the mHealthSurvey or other to capture the H544 attribute information if the patient record is a notifiable disease. One option we are looking at is using
OpenRosa XForm technology to make this adjustment.
