Description of Session
The time is ripe for employing big data to detect epidemics and improve health care. Doing so can help battle child mortality in Burkina Faso where 1 in 10 children do not survive to the age of 5 today. Terre des hommes built an e-diagnostic tool for childcare, IeDA, which starting in 2014 now covers nearly half of all health centers in Burkina Faso. IeDA digitalizes the IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illness) protocol of WHO (World Health Organization). The application has been developed on the CommCare platform, and runs on Android tablets. Thus far IeDA has been deployed in 730+ health care centers in Burkina Faso. An audit by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, revealed that in these centers 92% of the frontline health workers now adhere to the digitalized IMCI protocol. Because of the great success of IeDA, the country has data on 4 million children’s consultations, each tagged with a timestamp and geographic location. In collaboration with the Cloudera Foundation, the faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, Tableau and the Burkina Faso Ministry of Health (MoH), we are now moving to the next stage of data driven decision making & analysis. We are in the process of setting up a data pipeline, that aims to: (1) predict epidemic outbreaks, (2) improve the quality of work of the frontline health workers, and (3) deploy smart dashboards serving better and more relevant information to the people making decisions. The project represents a unique opportunity to make a large impact given that the IeDA infrastructure is well in place and is expanding constantly: by 2023 the entire country will be covered. By complementing IeDA with state-of-the-art data science, funded by the Cloudera Foundation, we can make a leap in childcare efficacy.
