HP & Partners’ Mobile Disease Surveillance Technology Speeds up Response to Malaria Outbreaks

By Elisa_Greene

At the Global Business Coalition Health (GBCHealth) Conference in NYC where HP and its partners, Positive Innovation for the Next Generation (PING), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and mobile network provider MASCOM are receiving an award for their disease surveillance work, the company announced that the mobile based technology has improved response times to notify authorities of malaria outbreaks from four weeks to three minutes in the first year of the company’s pilot program. Due to the quick outbreak identification process, people affected can now receive help faster.

The program, announced last June, equips healthcare workers with mobile devices that collect malaria data and can be viewed in a geographic map of disease transmission to generate more context-aware information about outbreaks in order for workers to respond accordingly. Through the system to date, there have been a total of 1,068 real-time notifications and updates on disease patterns to Ministry of Health officials and health care workers. Eighty-nine potential malaria outbreaks have been identified in Botswana’s Chobe region, where the disease surveillance system was first piloted and rolled out.

HP and PING have large-scale expansion plans for the program including an additional 20 facilities in Botswana with over 100 health workers trained by June 1, an added 80 facilities by October 2012, and the surveillance of other diseases, beginning with multi-drug resistance tuberculosis in August 2012.

PING also plans to develop a self-training game tutorial to complement the reporting and mapping interface running on the phones. This will empower health care workers to complete self-paced training on use of the mobile tools.

HP and its partners will be awarded the GBCHealth Business Action on Health Award today for our Disease Surveillance and Mapping Project in Bostwana in the Partnership/Collective Action category.

Please visit our website for more information about HP’s collaboration with PING: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/social-innovation/ping.html.