New Ebola Contact Tracing Template App Released

As part of the Fighting Ebola: a Grand Challenge for Development award from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Dimagi conducted field trips to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea to learn about and support the role of mobile technology in Ebola response and recovery during the past year. Following these trips, we developed several starter applications for organizations working in Ebola response and recovery. We are excited to add a new starter app for contact tracing efforts. This template app is based on several applications we built during the Ebola crisis.

The “Contact Tracing 2.0 Application” is featured on the CommCare Exchange, and can be freely downloaded and adapted by any organization that wants to deploy contact tracers in the field. It includes registration and tracking of Ebola patients, and follow-up with the households and contacts that are being monitored daily for symptoms. The application triggers alerts if an individual becomes a suspected case, making it widely deployable to investigation teams who need to quickly identify and follow up with contacts.

Key Features of the application:

• Tracing of Ebola patients, households of contacts, and individual contacts attached to their respective parent cases
• Daily monitoring forms for visiting contacts
• Alerts for when contacts have a high temperature or show symptoms
• GPS map view of cases on phone to find cases easily
• Images for symptom questions to help users engage

This is one of several Ebola starter applications available, the others include:

• Infection, Prevention, Control (IPC) – available on the exchange here
• Supply Chain Management for IPC – contact supply@dimagi.com if interested in deploying
• Ebola Education, Training, and Stigma Reduction – available on the exchange here
• Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) Decommissioning – available on the exchange here

These features build off of lessons learned from Dimagi’s two large-scale contact tracing deployments in West Africa. Check back next Monday for a recap on the key lessons learned.