ArticleHealth policy and planning2025
Digitalizing disease surveillance: experience from Sierra Leone.
Article in Health policy and planning, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Completion of early response actions accounted for most elapsed time across the 7-1-7 pathway in Sierra Leone, 2023-2025.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Beyond Training: Systems Framework for Sustainable Health Informatics Investment in Africa.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2026Article
- Implementation of digital tuberculosis information systems: perspectives from 10 high TB burden countries.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Comprehensive review of One Health systems for emerging infectious disease detection and management.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2025Review
- Communicable Disease Surveillance in South Africa and LMICs: A Systematic Review of Systems, Challenges, and Integration with Environmental Health.Tropical medicine and infectious disease · 2025Review
- Infection prevention and control measures for emerging infectious disease: lessons learned from the first case of imported Lassa fever in China.Antimicrobial resistance and infection control · 2025Article
- Evaluating the performance of digital surveillance for epidemic-prone diseases in Kwango Province, Democratic Republic of Congo.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Scaling up of electronic case-based disease surveillance reporting for COVID-19 and other notifiable diseases through capacity building and antigen RDT provision: a case study of Sierra Leone.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) system was adopted by the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health (MOH) in 2008, which was based on paper-based tools for health data recording and reporting from health facilities to the national level. The Sierra Leone MoH introduced the implementation of electronic case-based disease surveillance reporting of immediately notifiable diseases. This study aims to document and describe the experience of Sierra Leone in transforming her paper-based disease surveillance system into an electronic disease surveillance system. Retrospective mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative data were reviewed. Qualitative data were collected by reviewing surveillance technical reports, epidemiological bulletins, COVID-19, IDSR technical guidelines, Digital Health strategy and DHIS2 documentation. Content and thematic data analyses were performed for the qualitative data, while Microsoft Excel and DHIS2 platform were used for the quantitative data analysis to document the experience of Sierra Leone in digitalizing its disease surveillance system. In the early 2017, a web-based electronic Case-Based Disease Surveillance (eCBDS) for real-time reporting of immediately notifiable diseases and health threats was piloted using the District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2) software. The eCBDS integrates case profile, laboratory, and final outcome data. All captured data and information are immediately accessible to users with the required credentials. The system can be accessed via a browser or an Android DHIS2 application. By 2021, there was a significant increase in the proportion of immediately notifiable cases reported through the facility-level electronic platform, and more than 80% of the cases reported through the weekly surveillance platform had case-based data in eCBDS. Case-based data from the platform are analysed and disseminated to stakeholders for public health decision-making. Several outbreaks of Lassa fever, Measles, vaccine-derived Polio and Anthrax have been tracked in real-time through the eCBDS.
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