Pilot of the Epidemic Preparedness in Communities (EPiC) system in Sierra Leone

Narrative Description of Project: Much of the data collected during the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in Sierra Leone remains siloed in various organisations. The Ministry of Health has multiple Health Information Systems (HIS), such as DHIS2 and IDSR, and in addition NGO partners collected data that did not fit into HIS, such as surveys and social mobilisation data.  Sharing of these disparate data sources is difficult since the formal HIS are not interoperable, and there is no common platform to share other forms of data collected by NGO partners.

There is a need to improve timely access to data to provide a rapid, coordinated response in the future. IBM Research | Africa received funding through the USAID Ebola Grand Challenges Award to build an Epidemic Preparedness in Communities (EPiC) system that will provide decision makers and program implementers, both in the Ministry of Health and in NGOs, to quickly and intuitively share data. The system allows the user to easily upload data on health facility assessments and disease surveillance and map it, and in addition provides analytics to score facilities on their accessibility.

For this project, we carried out a pilot run at the District Health Medical Team (DHMT) at Port Loko and the Open Government Initiative (OGI) at Freetown. We were tasked with training the end users in how to use the platform, diagnosing and addressing any problems that arise in the platform during the pilot, and mapping out the improvements that can be made in the platform.

Description of Actual Services Provided by Our Staff:

1. Conducted the pilot of the EPiC system in Port Loko and the OGI office at Freetown
2. Created and conducted baseline, mid pilot and end pilot evaluations with the different stakeholders

Worked with the partner organisations on the ground in understanding their data workflows, and ensured that the relevant datasets were being reported on time