PROBLEM
SOLUTION
IHF collaborated with The Ministry of Health and Family Welfareās National Vector Borne Disease Control Program (NVBDCP), Government of India, to strengthen malaria surveillance by supporting the development of a digital dashboard with 10 years of retrospective data, which is useful for data analysis, and knowledge building as India gets closer to the elimination goal. The project was delivered in 2022. Today, the dashboard is being used to track key metrics such as total cases recorded, total positive cases, no. of rapid diagnostic tests being performed, no. of blood slides examined, distribution of cases by age, no. of severe cases and deaths at national, state and block/taluka level. In future, the dashboard holds potential to integrate malaria case data with climate and other data, and implement analytics to assess disease trends, outbreaks and determine the response, quantify, and forecast resource requirements, assess program performance, and adjust interventions. Effective monitoring and surveillance of vector-borne diseases like malaria is of paramount importance for the prevention of and timely response to outbreaks. One of the key aspects of surveillance is timely data/information collection and processing it forward for timely decision making, which goes through different steps from sub-centre level onwards. Current primary care-level surveillance and reporting is based on time-consuming and error-prone manual and paper-based methods that face several systemic and operational challenges such as slow speed and lack of real-time reporting, absence of consistency across different states, poor data back-up and storage possibilities, as well as lack of proper data analytics for identifying disease trends. A robust real-time and complete surveillance system that addresses these bottlenecks has been identified as a core need in the Nation
