A Mobile Application for Reporting Disease Incidents

Abstract

The current procedure for the reporting of cholera cases in Uganda contains many manual steps across several levels of the health infrastructure. Because of this there is a large chance of errors in the information flow, possibly delaying the signalling of an outbreak. The lack of accurate and complete data also hinders research into the spread of cholera. To improve the cholera reporting an application called Dira (Disease Incidence Reporting Application) has been developed for mobile devices, that allows the field registration of patients to be done quickly, easily and accurately. By entering the data directly on an electronic device there is no longer the need for separate digitization steps. By transferring case data directly from the hand-held device to a central server at the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the reliability of the data can be increased and the time to launch a response to an outbreak can be decreased. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.