One Health Surveillance Platform (OHSP) was built on a surveillance system that was built by Luke International in response to the Ebola disease. It aims to be a robust, coordinated, and effective system that can collect, analyze and provide feedback in real-time for potential disease outbreaks. With the COVID-19 pandemic escalating, the Ministry of Health saw an opportunity to leverage the platform to aid the response. The project quickly shifted gears and built-in functions that supported the need to manage the growing number of cases. Eventually, the One Health Surveillance Platform became the main platform for all COVID-19 data. More than 550 users were trained in the system in 16 districts across the country.
Nationwide
Lack of harmonized and integrated national public health surveillance system to support nations' surveillance need with One Health Approach.
The OHSP was developed before the Covid-19 Pandemic. It started as a medium pilot to strengthen the human health surveillance system as one of the key data repository and analysis components to the electronic integrated diseases surveillance and response system (eIDSR). Due to the effect from Covid-19, the OHSP was able to rapidly scale up nationwide with vast support from different funders and partners. Two key lessons were learned from the OHSP development and roll-out:
1. User-centric design: the OHSP was developed as an initiative from the Public Health Institute of Malawi, Ministry of Health. Analysts and developers were adequately guided by the surveillance business owner - epidemiology unit to analyze and design the system, including paper and digital forms, business process thoroughly. This enabled to shorten the system's actual development time and flexibility to rapidly extend the solution to support Covid-19 responses.
2. Importance of system hosting infrastructure: the OHSP is the first Malawi nationwide use system that takes care of individual-level data, with frequent data transactions (nearly real-time). Hence, the initial pilot servers were not able to cope with the need to provide a fully functional OHSP service. Fortunately, we received the support from World Bank through WHO to MoH. Hence, the OHSP is now able to provide real-time surveillance services.
Not available now. (2022)