In response to the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world, Johns Hopkins Global mHealth Initiative and the Bloomberg School of Public Health compiled an audit of digital solutions that could support the contact tracing needs of responding countries.
“Mobile tools can facilitate and introduce efficiencies in monitoring, surveillance, detection, and prevention of COVID-19,” the report explains. “Evidence from the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic highlighted the challenges of paper-based contact tracing, which resulted in delays in communication and response related to incomplete contact identification and loss of contact lists.”
According to the report, the qualified tools would “have an established presence in several low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), and either have or could be rapidly reconfigured to address COVID-19 related case management and contact tracing needs.”
Nine platforms were selected for review based on their existing deployment, flexibility, and adaptability for COVID-19 use cases, their ability to support multiple languages, and stakeholder interest in how these applications can be leveraged in response to COVID-19: CommCare, Community Health Toolkit (CHT), DHIS2 Tracker, Go.Data, ODK, OpenSRP, RapidPro, SORMAS, and WelTel
The assessment highlights “two platforms that stand out for their maturity, flexibility, and large-scale deployments”: DHIS2 and CommCare. The assessment cites, among other features, CommCare’s superior ease of use, as well as its use as a COVID-19 response tool for 20,000 frontline workers in more than 30 countries around the world.
A profile of CommCare also outlines many of the core uses cases for the platform, from COVID-19 case management and contact tracing to facility readiness and lab test tracking.
The assessment also includes the evaluation of the platforms against sample use cases (e.g. patient triage, test referrals, and follow-up), as well as consideration criteria for decision makers on issues such as usability, documentation, reliability, and scalability. Johns Hopkins also highlights that CommCare supports programs that serve half a million users more than the next largest platform reviewed in the assessment.
“We are proud to be listed as one of the premier digital solutions available for COVID-19 response among such impressive partners,” said Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson. “The virus is spreading quickly, and organizations around the world need to collect and make sense of their information just as quickly. This report helps to highlight the value that these tools can offer in this moment.”
CommCare continues to be the COVID-19 response tool of choice for state, local, and national governments around the world, both as part of the COVID-19 Local Response System and as an evolution of the template applications.
For more information on Dimagi’s support of COVID-19 response efforts around the world, click here.
To review the full audit from Johns Hopkins, click here.
