Developing Mobile Application for Public Health Emergency Management System for Ethiopia Public Health Institute
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Date
2015-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Introduction: Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) is one of the core business
processes in Ethiopia Public Health Institute. The main function is to collect timely information
about the occurrence of disease outbreaks throughout the country. This information would help
the responsible organizations to take timely action if the number of cases is above the expected
threshold level. The major problems in PHEM is lack of adequate communication media among
all the responsible stakeholders, problem of getting quality and complete information on time.
Objectives: The objective of this project is to analyze, design, and develop a prototype mobile
application for Public Health Emergency Management system for Ethiopia Public Health
Institute.
Methods: All the important data/requirement collection instruments were used for this study.
On the basis of the identified instruments we conducted interview for the selected respondents.
The sample respondents were selected using purposive sampling techniques. In addition national
PHEM guidelines and other related documents were reviewed along with the interview and
observation we conducted. This helped us to determine the requirements of the new system.
Later on we mentioned the methodology software development life cycle, and water fall
approaches were used to develop the prototype mobile application.
Analysis and Design of the System: Then after analysis and design models were used like Use
cases to describe the basic functions of the information system, and Use case description to show
detail description of the activities and functions running in the early warning and surveillance
sub-process and other health related services, data flow diagram to depicts the actual flow or
movement of data in the system, activity diagram to show business process and work flow. The
analysis and design model is finalized by identifying the relevant analysis classes, attributes and
their respective operation for designing the new system, architectural design, entity relationship
diagram and user interface diagram were applied to elicit the parts of the system.
Conclusion: Problem of on time data collection, organization and reporting about disease
outbreak data are the main challenges in the public health emergency management system. In the
meantime the rapid growth of mobile phones has been contributing a lot in human’s daily
activity and organizational business. Therefore, we understood that the application of mobile
phones and its application in PHEM would play a vital role to bring a timely collection,
organizing and summarizing of data for evidence based decision making processes therefore a
prototype mobile application was developed to mitigate the above mentioned problems in
PHEM.
Recommendation: We recommend the responsible scholars to develop a complete mobile
application based on the analysis and design, the developed prototype mobile application done in
this study. To conduct summative usability testing and documenting all the necessary documents
to the responsible government organization for sustainability and future usage of the system.
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Keywords
Public Health Emergency Management System for Ethiopia