Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit: Data Collection
This post is the first of a series on the Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit, an open-source digital reporting platform developed by the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team, highlighting its purpose, key features, and instructions for deployment.
One of the two original workstreams within the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team was to provide surveillance tools that would enable the Ethiopian Ministry of Health (MoH0 to capture, aggregate, and analyze data from distributed sources. We started out by building a set of purpose-built products to increase their capacity to respond to COVID-19. As we make our solutions available to the Ethiopian MoH, we also want to make them available across the Africa continent and the world.
The tools highlighted in this post can be used by medical and public health offices, other concerned government bodies, and citizens to report information on suspected and confirmed cases. In addition to the purpose-built products from ECRT, we’ve included our assessment of various existing open-source tools that can be deployed alone or alongside our reporting forms.
The following criteria were considered in choosing/creating a suitable reporting form:
- Time to deployment
- Scalability
- Language translation
- Ease of Use
- Case follow-up
- Geolocation
- Platform support
Official reporting tools
Official reporting is done by government officials, medical professionals, or border patrol agents includes the following forms:
- Medical institutions / Healthcare professional reporting
- Door-to-door data collection
- Passengers Form
- Medical follow-up for suspected cases
CommCare
CommCare is a commonly-used open-source data collection platform that is developed by Dimagi. It is an open-source platform web-based health information management system. Free and paid versions of CommCare are available, however, the Advanced version is free for COVID-19 response efforts. Two options of data storage are available: the first is Software as a Service (SaaS) where technical infrastructure and handling scalability are included and the second is the option to host data on-premises. SaaS is a suggested solution as it is supported and requires the least amount of overhead. CommCare forms are also able to be customized and translated into different languages.
Can be used for data collection, case management, and storage
To Deploy: If using SaaS, no other tools are needed. If hosting elsewhere, a secure, redundant environment is needed to protect patient Personally Identifiable Information (PII), we recommend a cloud service for the fastest deployment.
Resourcing needs: Development skills are helpful but not required
District Health Information Software (DHIS2)
DHIS2 is another commonly used public health tool. It is an open-source platform web-based health information management system. DHIS2 is popular in many countries and maybe already in use, in some capacity in your country’s MoH. DHIS2 is also a free tool, meaning that decisions around data storage are the responsibility of each institution.
Can be used for Data collection and case management
To Deploy: Customers will be responsible for deploying this open-source tool in their own environment, with the appropriate components they want. To ensure the security and availability of the system, if the country’s data protection act allows, we recommend using a public cloud provider. It needs to be coupled with an external hosting environment.
Resourcing needs: Systems Administrator / DevOps / Cloud Engineer
Custom-built forms
Our team of developers built a platform for data collection, aggregation, and visualization for the Ethiopian Ministry of health — a dedicated post on this platform is forthcoming. Custom forms are useful if your organization has very specific requirements for handling data or needs a simple form with very limited technical components. Without these specific requirements, we recommend using existing purpose-built tools mentioned above or found elsewhere. If you decide to develop these forms internally, please note that you will need to either build a case management tool or connect them to an existing platform such as DHIS2 or CommCare. Again, if the country’s data protection act allows, we recommend using a public cloud provider for both developing these forms or hosting them. We will have more details about these forms and the technology stack we used.
Can be used for Data collection
To Deploy: Needs to be coupled with case management platform and hosting environment
Example of our forms GitHub Repo
Resourcing needs:
- Systems Administration / DevOps / Cloud Engineer
- Full Stack Developers
Individual reporting tools
Self-reported information is automatically considered “suspicious” until testing is done to confirm COVID-19 infection. Confirmation is done through a follow-up form which is prompted when a case enters the selected case management system.
Community Registration Form
This is a form accessible to the public to self-report or report on others who they have had contact with recently.
Can be used for Data collection from the public
To Deploy: Needs to be coupled with case management platform and hosting environment
Example of our forms GitHub Repo
Resourcing needs:
- Systems Administration / DevOps / Cloud Engineer
- Full Stack Developers
Interactive Voice Recording (IVR) /Hotline
An appropriate data collection effort will include some sort of hotline or call center. In our case, we did not have a hand in standing this up but we did make sure to include information recorded here into our aggregation API (more on this in a later post). It is important to have call centers ready and building them in a scalable manner. We have considered using Twillo, and Amazon Connect.
Can be used for Data collection
Bots
Chatbots for SMS, Telegram, Facebook, and Whatapp were developed to enable self-reporting from the public. We chose to include bots in our suite of reporting tools because texting is one of the main forms of communication and does not require access to the internet or deplete cell phone data, which can be expensive.
Can be used for Data collection
To deploy: Needs to be coupled with case management platform and hosting environment
Resourcing needs:
- Frontend Developers
Measuring success
While it is still too early to measure the success of our forms and data management efforts however we are confident that the effort to move to digital tracking is a significant improvement from pen and paper.
The Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit is a blog published by the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team (ECRT).
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