On June 29th, the Global Digital Health Network convened virtually for the Network’s monthly webinar, hosted by Palladium. The discussion was focused on COVID 19 Data Systems – Experience Sharing.
With the advent of the COVID 19 pandemic, organizations and individuals have had to adapt to new ways of operating, mainly due to lockdowns and other prophylactic public health measures implemented by Governments around the globe. New ways have doing business have emerged, with government leader’s world over coming under a lot of pressure to steer the epidemic response within their countries. Public health systems in resource limited settings have been hardly prepared to deal with the urgent need for data to inform implementation of non- pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Most of these countries have implemented a hybrid of electronic and manual data collection systems in the public health facilities, primarily through PEPFAR support. The data needed to inform COVID 19 epidemic response however comes from varied data sources outside the health facilities some of which include ports of entry, quarantine centers, national public health laboratories, COVID 19 treatment centers, communities e.t.c Development and deployment of digital solutions on the other hand is often a time consuming and resource intensive exercise. This has presented an opportunity to apply the principles of global goods and adapt/ re-use some of the open source systems that were previously developed and implemented in HIV programs to save on cost and time to deployment. Palladium mapped the systems available, developed roadmaps to quickly adapt the core and deploy interoperability layers to pull data from the various systems and data sources.This presentation looked at 2 case studies on how these systems have been adapted and deployed in Kenya and Nigeria and discussed some challenges encountered and lessons learnt.
Speakers (both from Palladium)
– Dr. Jacob Odhiambo
– Dr. Dauda Sulaiman Dauda
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/5ulcJZTB2GpJb7fO9m7wfvULNJz9aaa8gSZI-_tbyxqrTerYhZWmAF2ePh9jqEEC
