An Evidence-Based Approach on Public Health Decisions in Low-Middle Income Countries: Use Case of Senegal at the Verge of COVID-19

Abstract

The advent of health crises like COVID-19 in West Africa, and more particularly in Senegal, led the MoHSA, with the support of several development partners, to set up a real-time alert and information reporting system through the mInfoSante project. These informations are retrieved from Chief Nursing Officers, Chief Veterinary Officers, and more than 2,000 Community Watch & Alert Committees dispatched throughout the national territory. The ease of use of mInfoSante and its advantages has seduced professionals in the health sector. However, one will quickly realize that the exploitation of information can be tedious without the support of a system dedicated to this task. Due to the specificity of the sector as well as the technical and institutional environment, we had to adapt to a certain number of constraints in the identification and implementation of such a solution. To do this, we have studied a set of open-source and powerful Business Intelligence and Dashboarding solutions. According to the performed analysis, our solution, which make use of REST-based service composition, presents advantages of having functionalities related to the distributed storage & processing of large data sets, a capacity for rapid processing of all data types, good computing power offered by its optimized components, and fault tolerance due to integration of distributed infrastructure model.