To improve their response to outbreak of infectious diseases, countries in West Africa are embracing technology as part of the USAID-funded Regional Action through Data (RAD) program.
The Health Division of the Office of Sustainable Development in USAID’s Bureau for Africa awarded a five-year project to BroadReach to drive an innovative strategic initiative to improve health care outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The “Regional Action through Data” Cooperative Agreement was awarded on September 26, 2016, for a total estimated amount of $22.8 million. USAID revealed that the RAD project can accept funding from other USAID operating units.
According to the scope of the contract reviewed by healthnews.ng, BroadReach is required to develop a data-analytics capability at strategic health institutions, building an evidence-based foundation for decision-making by changing how and why data is collected, analyzed and used to maximize the positive impact of policies, programs and development investments on populations in need.
“To implement the project, BroadReach will leverage BroadReach Vantage, a data-driven platform with tools that include performance dashboards, advanced analytics, reporting, workflow toolkits and team collaboration,” USAID said in a statement.
Dr Uchenna Nwokenna, Acting Program Director: Regional Actions Through Data at BroadReach Consulting noted that every year, infectious diseases such as Ebola and malaria claim the lives of about five million Africans, and the inability to monitor and share information at scale has been a major set-back in the control of outbreaks.
“These outbreaks have major, far-reaching implications for the communities they affect. We believe that the prevention and control of infectious disease outbreaks is possible when you combine human ingenuity and technology,” Nwokenna said.
Through the West African Health Organisation (WAHO), member countries are exploring innovative uses of technology in partnership with BroadReach Consulting to:Support improvement of the production, dissemination and use of health information; Strengthen cross-border health and epidemiological surveillance; and support cross-border health mapping, monitoring of epidemic-prone diseases(EPDs) vaccination and HIV programmes, and cross-border collaboration.
Specifically, RAD is using the ‘Disease Threat Management Solution’ of BroadReach Consulting, which leverages Vantage technology to track and analyse data for major infectious diseases, including Ebola, Onchocerciasis and Cholera, in each country.
“Vantage collates and digests a large amount of indicator data from different countries to produce a weekly Epidemiology Bulletin. The weekly bulletin is circulated among senior health officials and, should there be a risk of an outbreak or an actual occurrence in a border region, the relevant agencies are alerted and guided to mobilise resources and take effective action to prevent or contain the outbreak,” BroadReach Consulting said in a statement.