BRUSSELS, 01 April 2021 – PRN Africa — Since the coronavirus outbreak, Elsi’s team have been using EU-backed SORMAS technology to track the spread of coronavirus in Nigeria. SORMAS stands for Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System. It’s free to use and easy to set up.
The software has been deployed in Nigeria and Ghana in cooperation with local authorities and health bodies, such as the Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control. It lets healthcare workers around the country enter their findings into a shared database. Information about confirmed or suspected cases is then relayed back to analysts.
Developing countries often rely on paper-based medical records, which take much longer to process manually and can be misplaced. Because of this, governments can struggle to maintain an accurate oversight of how fast the disease is spreading. This is what makes SORMAS digital technology so revolutionary. The data is immediately communicated and authorities can coordinate their actions in real time as they confront the spread of a disease. They can also use it to predict future outbreaks.