Digital Square is a partnership of digital health experts and organizations working together to create digital health systems in developing
countries. The aim of Digital Square is to help strengthen national digital health systems by coordinating investments into scalable technology
solutions and creating an environment in which they can be sustained for maximum impact. This proposal is in response to a funding
opportunity put forth by Digital Square to invest in digital health global goods (software that is usually free and open source). The Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has several years of experience in developing and deploying digital health open source
software. JHU/APL has developed the Suite for Automated Global Electronic bioSurveillance (SAGES), which is a set of open source digital
tools designed to meet the challenges of electronic disease surveillance in resource-limited settings. It is freely available to download, and the
source code is available on GitHub. The suite of tools enables users to perform data collection, as well as spatial and temporal analysis and
visualization of health-related data. Furthermore, the tools include detection algorithms to alert an end user to an anomaly in a data stream over
time – for example, higher than expected cases of fever in a given population or geographic area.
SAGES tools are built in a modular nature, which allows the user to select one or more tools to enhance an existing surveillance system, or to
use the tools en masse for an end-to-end electronic disease surveillance capability. The philosophy behind the design and development of
SAGES was to create a lightweight system that end users can easily configure, use, and maintain on their own without the need for specialized
information technology or software skills for a prolonged period of time.
If the proposal is granted, funding will be used to support the development of new functionality that will enable SAGES users to easily
incorporate data from multiple sources into a single SAGES analysis and visualization platform.