Open Source Software Tool Helps Governments Monitor COVID-19

To combat COVID-19’s impact on communities now, and prevent and prepare for similar outbreaks in the future, America’s Charities has partnered with Feeding America and PATH. This guest post from PATH (originally published here) demonstrates some of the ways PATH is responding to COVID-19 and learning from it to prevent similar outbreaks from happening again. Learn more about PATH’s work at www.PATH.org.

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. 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. And it’s one of many such tools promoted by the PATH-led Digital Square initiative.

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. 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. Since its development, SORMAS has been used in response to multiple simultaneous outbreaks of monkeypox, Lassa fever, and meningococcal disease.

With the emergence of COVID-19, HZI rapidly developed a module for detection and control of the virus. 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. The Nigeria Public Health Service is using SORMAS for epidemiological follow-up and containment. In Nepal, national public health authorities are preparing to deploy SORMAS in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The uptake in country adoption demonstrates the importance of having flexible, responsive options to health crises.

The SORMAS-CoV module contains all disease-specific diagnostic standards, case definitions, and containment procedures defined by the World Health Organization. All procedures are embedded in the new module and compatible with those already in the SORMAS software. This includes different user roles within public health services, such as local informants, epidemiologists, laboratory technicians, and point of entry officers. 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. Furthermore, the task management feature, a strength of SORMAS, facilitates coordinated action of the surveillance personnel in the outbreak response.