If a patient arrives at a hospital with possible signs of COVID-19, health workers or surveillance personnel are prompted by SORMAS with questions about symptoms specific to the virus, such as fever, coughing, and shortness of breath. SORMAS supports the rapid identification and reporting of suspected cases.
Armed with details about a patient’s symptoms, lab results, and hospitalization, surveillance personnel can contain the spread of an epidemic from reaching the wider population. The SORMAS tool provides information that health workers need to identify and slow the spread of disease. Furthermore, the task management feature, a strength of SORMAS, facilitates coordinated action of the surveillance personnel in the outbreak response. The module allows the targeted collection of relevant epidemiological data about the case person, including hospitalization, symptoms, and persons with whom they have come into contact. This includes different user roles within public health services, such as local informants, epidemiologists, laboratory technicians, and point of entry officers. All procedures are embedded in the new module and compatible with those already in the SORMAS software. The SORMAS-CoV module contains all disease-specific diagnostic standards, case definitions, and containment procedures defined by the World Health Organization.
The uptake in country adoption demonstrates the importance of having flexible, responsive options to health crises. In Nepal, national public health authorities are preparing to deploy SORMAS in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The Nigeria Public Health Service is using SORMAS for epidemiological follow-up and containment.
Both the Ghana Health Service and Nigeria Centre for Disease Control immediately activated this new module in more than 400 districts already using SORMAS, as well as in ports of entry such as airports and harbors, covering a population of more than 85 million. With the emergence of COVID-19, HZI rapidly developed a module for detection and control of the virus. Since its development, SORMAS has been used in response to multiple simultaneous outbreaks of monkeypox, Lassa fever, and meningococcal disease. As a multifunctional tool, it can be used for case surveillance, laboratory data management, contact tracing, and disease detection-all of which support the prevention and management of outbreaks. SORMAS was developed by the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) jointly with multiple international partners during the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak as an early warning and management system. And it's one of many such tools promoted by the PATH-led Digital Square initiative.
#Long path tool open spurce software#
It's what the digital health sector refers to as a "global good," an adaptable, interoperable, open source software designed to meet the data and management needs of country health systems. The Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System, or SORMAS, is an open source mobile and web application that enables health workers to notify health departments about new cases of epidemic-prone diseases, detect outbreaks, and manage outbreak responses.
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