Design and Application of Emergency Response Mobile Phone Based Information System for Infectious Disease Reporting Used in WenChuan Earthquake-Affected Areas

Objective: Design, implement, and use a mobile-phone-based information system to provide more timely infectious disease reporting during an emergency. Methods: Approaches of Software engineering and enterprise modeling were used to develop the emergency response Mobile-phone-based Information System (MIS) for Infectious Disease Reporting. The software was built by a Chinese company for China CDC at no cost. Phones were provided to field officers in villages, clinics, and residency camps in Wenchuan. They reported basic demographics and “yes” or “no” for each listed disease, or typed in “other” and sent via text message to a data center for daily data aggregation.

Results: At 7 days after the initiation of the reporting system, reporting rate of earthquake zone through the MIS have reached the level of the same period in 2007. The surveillance of weekly morbidity reporting in the earthquake zone after the initiation of mobile phone based information system for infectious disease reporting showed the same trend with the last 3 years. Conclusions: Emergency response MIS for Infectious Disease Reporting was an effective solution for the urgent reporting and management of communicable disease surveillance information. The system assured the consistency of disease surveillance data and facilitated sensitive, accurate and timely disease surveillance. It is an important resource to supplement the normal national web-based direct reporting system of communicable diseases. The system picked up at least as many disease cases as were picked up manually in the past 3 years. This paper will present an open discussion of recommendations for further use of mobile-based emergency response systems.