Monitoring Disease Outbreak through Geographical Representation in Rural Areas

Geographical analysis and tracking of the spread of epidemics and other diseases is an important issue and is of gre¬¬¬at concern to healthcare professionals all over the world. Information technology has played a vital role in building tools for spatial analysis of spread of diseases and hence has made it possible to track epidemics and early adoption of preventive measures. In this paper, we present a model eSystem for spatial plotting of patients for a disease using our Jaroka Tele-Healthcare System (JTHS) and Google Maps. We use the existing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure to provide healthcare to people in remote and rural areas of Pakistan. Lady and Community Health Workers (LCHWs) use simple mobile phones to register patients and report symptoms using the Short Messaging Service (SMS) with the JTHS. Further correspondence for prescription and follow-up diagnosis of the registered patients can also be carried out using the system. This is especially important for remote areas where medical facilities are either rare or completely unavailable. JTHS enables doctors, medical experts and health officials to view the geospatial location of more than twenty thousand patients on the click of a button. This model has been successfully implemented in the rural areas of Mardan, KPK Pakistan and is now being replicated in other parts of the country. The system is unique in the sense that it uses mobile phones based crowd-sourcing to register patients and enable health professionals to track spread of diseases. We also show how population migration affected disease incidence in rural Mardan and how JTHS was able to geographically display the spread of disease.