Notifiable diseases such as Cholera, Ebola, Malaria and many more need to be treated and contained in a timely manner. To be able to report,
respond to and provide surveillance when a notifiable disease has been detected, many countries are tied to no, or slow paper-based systems.
Akros in collaboration with the Zambian Ministry of Health has developed a comprehensive electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance and
Response system (eIDSR) based on the Digital Health Information System tool (DHIS2). MoH and members of World Health Organization
(WHO) inputted into this tool and relevant Zambian Ministry of Health officers have been trained as trainers to use the tool.
Since it is built on DHIS2 its roll-out and scalability will not be a large hurdle, as 47 countries are already using DHIS2 for data entry in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America. DHIS2 also has a large user community due to its use by so many governments. As DHIS2 is an open source tool the
eIDSR tool will also be open and free and questions regarding the tool can be answered by a large active, online DHIS2 community.
The eIDSR includes electronic surveillance forms as well as associated lab forms in accordance with WHO standards. This proposal seeks to
find funding to roll out the eIDSR (the paper based system is already in use in Zambia) to two of the most populated Provinces in Zambia to
pinpoint bugs and needs for further development of the tool so that it can be made available to all countries in need of an eIDSR. Once the tool
has been fully ground tested (DHIS2 has, but not this eIDSR, DHIS2 build), the tool itself will be made available under an open source license
(BSD). In addition, training manuals on how to modify the eIDSR tool to a specific country (countries have different notifiable
diseases/thresholds) and how to use the Zambia tool, will be made available in manual and video formats.