Dimagi Joins Ebola Response Efforts in West Africa

Led by Columbia University’s Earth Institute, CommCare was recently deployed by UNFPA in Guinea to support contact tracers to conduct sensitization and contact tracing, supported by a real-time informatics system. The CommCare application is available for free download on the CommCare Exchange.

The program will be deployed over the next six months, initially focusing on the regions with the highest numbers of Ebola cases, and then transitioning to reaching the whole country. Contingent upon the progression of the epidemic, the countrywide contact tracers will be trained to become CHWs and will start conducting diagnosis and treatment of malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, and malnutrition as the epidemic subsides, with continuation of Ebola sensitization.

This system is supported by CommCare, providing real-time information that will inform local response teams and governance units on areas of need for intensified Ebola response and health systems strengthening. This progression will be key in the long-term goal to create a robust CHW system for primary health care to strengthen the fragmented health systems that have crumbled under the pressure brought on by the epidemic in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

For the next two years, Dimagi has committed to offering free CommCare licenses to organizations that wish to deploy existing or new Ebola-related applications. We wish to provide a coordinated and helpful intervention at a time when health systems and personnel are being pushed beyond their limits.

We envision CommCare augmenting the following roles in the Ebola crisis:

• Surveillance and contact tracing
• Adherence to screening and triage protocols
• Sensitization and information dissemination
• Diagnostics/Lab tracking
• Stock tracking
• Patient self-reporting

Dimagi has partnered with Tableau, a leading software company specializing in interactive data visualization, to also offer free licenses for Ebola response projects that they have granted to Dimagi. Visualizations developed with Tableau will be able to be used by local response teams to follow the health status of individual cases and analyze the Ebola outbreak patterns in the area in order to coordinate response activities.

For questions regarding Dimagi’s involvement in Ebola-related efforts, please contact Emma Little at elittle@dimagi.com