Public health workers are frontline responders during disease outbreaks. In order to prevent diseases from spreading, they need to be able to alert authorities quickly and accurately in order to ensure they get the right resources at the right time in order to keep communities healthy.
Paper-based methods present challenges that make health and disease data reporting time-consuming and error sensitive, resulting in questionable credibility and completeness of information.
In order to report diseases that have been encountered in a facility, in the traditional system a health worker would fill in a paper form, cases and deaths, grouped by age. Every week this form would be sent to the office of the chiefdom.
Here all the forms from all the facilities will be collected and sent over to the District office.
In the district office the paper piles up and eventually will be entered into a digital record system, like Excel sheets.
In this current workflow it takes several weeks until a disease outbreak gets noticed at national level. Also the reporting rates are low and the data quality is poor.