Ebola Outbreak Containment: Real-Time Task and Resource Coordination With SORMAS

Abstract

Background: Since the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, more than 11,000 people died. For outbreaks of infectious diseases like this, the rapid implementation of control measures is a crucial factor for containment. In West African countries, outbreak surveillance is a paper-based process with significant delays in forwarding outbreak information, which affects the ability to react adequately to situational changes. Our objective therefore was to develop a tool that improves data collection, situation assessment, and coordination of response measures in outbreak surveillance processes for a better containment. Methods:We have developed the Surveillance and Outbreak Response Management System (SORMAS) based on findings from Nigeria's 2014 Ebola outbreak. We conducted a thorough requirements engineering and defined personas and processes. We also defined a data schema with specific variables to measure in outbreak situations. We designed our system to be a cloud application that consists of interfaces for both mobile devices and desktop computers to support all stakeholders in the process. In the field, health workers collect data on the outbreak situation via mobile applications and directly transmit it to control centers. At the control centers, health workers access SORMAS via desktop computers, receive instant updates on critical situations, react immediately on emergencies, and coordinate the implementation of control measures with SORMAS. Results:We have tested SORMAS in multiple workshops and a field study in July 2015.Results from workshops confirmed derived requirements and implemented features, but also led to further iterations on the systems regarding usability. Results from the field study are currently under assessment. General feedback showed high enthusiasm about the system and stressed its benefits for an effective outbreak containment of infectious diseases.Conclusions: SORMAS is a software tool to support health workers in efficiently handling outbreak situations of infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Our tool enables a bi-directional exchange of situational data between individual stakeholders in outbreak Perscheid et al. Ebola Outbreak Containment With SORMAS containment. This allows instant and seamless collection of data from the field and its instantaneous analysis in operational centers. By that, SORMAS accelerates the implementation of control measures, which is crucial for a successful outbreak containment.

Assessing the Concepts and Designs of 58 Mobile Apps for the Management of the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola Outbreak: Systematic Review

“…SORMAS was piloted in the field during the EVD outbreak after the epidemic in Nigeria and is therefore based on a practical EVD outbreak scenario. Additionally, it contains a function for rumor management, which was particularly important during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak [ 18 ]. Sense Ebola Followup was deployed during the EVD outbreak in Nigeria [ 19 ].…”

COVID-19 Pandemic Readiness Status of West Africa

“…In the face of shortages in the numbers of skilled public health workforce, and coming to terms with the reality that population growth and the rise in burden of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases will always outpace the rates of increase in workforce to population ratio, adopting innovations such as the use of digital tools for surveillance and outbreak response is the way forward to consolidating the gains made so far in promoting the ECOWAS regional health security in particular, and global health security in general. During the West Africa EVD outbreak, the ECOWAS Regional Centres for Surveillance and Disease Control (RCSDC) seized the opportunity to collaborate with the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) of Germany with nancial support from the German International Co-operation (GIZ) to develop and deploy the mobile eHealth tool called SORMAS (Surveillance, Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System); and this facilitated early case detection, contact tracing, and real-time data analysis that helped to e ciently contain the outbreak in Nigeria (31). SORMAS was initially deployed in 22 federal states (448 local government areas) in Nigeria; and 2 regions (35 districts) in Ghana (32).…”

The adoption of contact tracing applications of COVID-19 by European governments

“…In the case of both the Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) epidemics, digital contact tracing is conducted through an application installed on individual smartphones (Armstrong 2020;Perscheid et al 2018). Through wireless communication mechanisms (i.e.…”

“…Contact tracing can be defined as the identification and the monitoring of each person who has been in contact with an infected person (Perscheid et al 2018). Originally developed to curb syphilis at the end of the 1930s, manual contact tracing is crucial to slow the spread of an epidemic (McLachlan et al 2020).…”

“…the time lag due to the manual tracing process), (2) limited data processing, (3) respondent oversights or omissions, and (4) the inability to identify individuals in a crowd (Alsdurf et al 2020;Watts 2020). Faced with these limitations, research on digital contact tracing has been carried out, leading to the administration of preliminary tests in 2014 during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (Chen et al 2017;Perscheid et al 2018;Weiss et al 2019).…”