eHealth Africa has been using technology to strengthen health systems in West Africa for 5 years. When the Ebola outbreak reached Lagos, the Nigerian government called on eHealth Africa to assist in providing immediate emergency support.
The result was the creation of Project Sense, an award-winning open source platform based on lightweight, cutting edge mobile and web technologies (including Angular JS and CouchDB). This platform was designed to support emergency management staff by tracing people who had come into contact with a person infected by ebola. This enabled a critical step in exponentially increasing the speed of response and containing the spread of infection.
Thanks to round-the-clock efforts by staff and their counterparts, eHealth Africa was able to put together a prototype of Project Sense in just 3 days. Staff on the ground then worked with the dedicated contact tracing teams to customize and deploy. The timely and effective contact tracing effort quickly grew to include over a thousand contacts, and the Nigerian ebola outbreak was halted at 20 cases.
This eHealth platform is now being implemented to meet the surveillance and response challenges in the remaining countries effected by ebola in West Africa. With the platform’s track record and the dedicated efforts of staff and other health workers, we hope to see the ebola outbreak stopped for good.