Awards

Sergio Chicumbe and colleagues at the Instituto Nacional de Saúde in Mozambique together with the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders will create a plan for strengthening the national surveillance and response systems established during the COVID-19 pandemic and expanding them to multiple diseases. During the pandemic, they built systems that spanned the public and private sectors to ensure rapid testing and data collection country-wide, as well as data reporting in real-time. Their proposal will involve integrating this system with existing surveillance systems such as the countrywide mortality surveillance for action, which registers births and deaths. The proposal will also link laboratory data with individual data collected by public health officials, while ensuring confidentiality, to produce more valuable datasets for public health and emergency response. They will also provide training to strengthen analytical capabilities and establish a data-to-action framework to support decision-making.

Mohamed Alex Vandi and colleagues at the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone together with Umar N’jai of the University of Sierra Leone will develop a plan to strengthen and integrate the national capacity for disease surveillance in Sierra Leone to better prevent, detect and respond to diseases and public health emergencies. Sierra Leone has a fragile healthcare system, and increasing coordination, human resources, infrastructure and reporting tools would make it less susceptible to epidemic threats. The plan will involve strengthening the existing disease surveillance systems for human, animal and environmental health by integrating them and enabling data sharing and interoperability, and enhancing data quality and integrity. They will also plan the production of early warning systems, which will involve building and integrating a national mortality surveillance platform, and the development of a national protocol for ongoing surveillance of cases of acute febrile illnesses and viral hemorrhagic fevers, many of which remain undiagnosed.

Aamer Ikram and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Pakistan will develop a plan for an upgraded and integrated disease surveillance system that detects, reports, investigates and responds to multiple public health threats from communicable diseases like cholera and natural disasters such as floods. The current disease surveillance systems in Pakistan are fragmented and there is no central repository of health information. This hampers data-driven decision-making, which is needed to prevent the spread of disease. They will develop a costed action plan and conduct a feasibility analysis for integrating multiple disease surveillance and response data streams through application programming interfaces (APIs), which will result in national patient registries. This will also involve building and training machine learning models to link different data sets, and developing and implementing artificial intelligence technology with visualization tools to improve data analysis and forecasting.

Alex Riolexus Ario and colleagues at the Uganda National Institute of Public Health will develop a plan that transforms disease surveillance in Uganda by upgrading it to an integrated, real-time, digitized national disease surveillance system that works across the human, animal and environment sectors. Uganda is located in the eco-rich Congo basin and the filovirus and meningitis belts, which increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and natural disasters. While electronic tools and reporting are available, they have limited coverage, use, and interoperability across sectors. Their proposal will bring together relevant stakeholders to develop objectives, strategies and activities, as well as costing and roadmaps. The plan will involve multiple collaborators in activities including linking the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system with case-based surveillance to determine disease burdens. It will also involve further digitizing laboratory data, and integrating and ensuring interoperability of the multiple surveillance data reporting platforms currently used by the different sectors.