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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Public Health Emergency Management System for Ethiopia

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