2Paths Solution Brief
Customer: United Nations (UN)
Industry: International Development
Location: Geneva
Solution:2Paths Disease Incidence Management Platform
2Paths Engineers Disease Incidence Management Platform
THE ORGANIZATION
The UN Agency is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends. This global organization generates authoritative health information, in consultation with leading experts, to set norms and standards, articulate evidence-based policy options and monitor the evolving global heath situation.
THE CHALLENGE
The UN Agency recognized that by combining geospatial information, disease incidence data and social and environmental information, healthcare authorities could more effectively identify potential epidemics. Their challenge is to provide the pubic health managers at all levels the ability to detect outbreak conditions early enough to respond quickly to prevent widespread infection, ultimately saving lives and improving their ability to predict future outbreak conditions. The Agency needed help to build a prototype system to show healthcare and aid development organizations proof of this concept.
Designing for flexibility and scale
The UN Agency wanted to be able to collect and report out disease incidence information at local, national, regional and global levels, eliminating spreadsheets and other manual methods for data collection and collation. They needed an easy, highly flexible way for medical personnel to input disease incidence information into a globally accessible database that would support accurate and thorough reporting. The system also had to seamlessly integrate with other health management information from highly diverse sources.
The new platform also had to support multiple levels of client configuration for use in the field, on site, and at national and global levels. At the same time, the collected data from the various deployments would potentially aggregate up each scale – locally, nationally, regionally and eventually to the UN agency’s global data warehouse. At each step it had to be auditable to ensure consistently high data quality.
THE SOLUTION
Together 2Paths, under sub-contract from another development firm, and the IT team at the UN Agency, created a blueprint architecture and a working prototype for the one-of-a-kind system for global health data entry, analysis, reporting and exchange. After an intensive analysis phase, 2Paths developers produced the prototype in less than three months, using an agile-development process to reduce risk and provide noticeable progress rapidly throughout the project.
“At 2Paths we have embraced agile development because clients can follow the progress we make and enter into the process far more than if we just took down requirements and went away for a year and built them out,” says Aaron Gladders, CEO of 2Paths. “We involve the client in all phases of a project to validate and refine our direction on a continuous basis.”
2Paths divided the prototype into several components introducing as few constraints as possible and permitting multiple configurations. “To avoid tying the client to expensive licensing costs, which can be a deterrent to widespread sharing we used open source software. However, a major condition for the prototype was that it had to have the ability to swap open source components with custom or commercially available replacements,” explains Gladders.
Open Architecture
“The architecture is a light-weight Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that allows REST-based access to a collection of loosely-coupled and potentially distributed components,” says 2Paths System Architect, Nickolas Grabovac. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) routes client requests to the correct components. Clients access all service components via the ESB rather than directly so components can swap out with no impact to other parts. The ESB also provides overall system security and an access audit trail.
“The advantage of this architecture is that components scale individually based on configuration requirements and demand,” explains Grabovac. For example, when deploying the system for a small region, the entire application might run on a single server with a single instance of each of the application components. At the national level, with a cluster, each component could run on a separate server to improve performance.
When built, the system will store disease incidence information gathered in the field and maps this information to a GIS database. This will allows users to enter information to the database using an intuitive graphical map interface. Health managers or other authorities can also access the information for analysis and quick viewing using rapid access map and dashboard views so they can monitor at a glance disease patterns and risk factors that may contribute to an outbreak.
THE REWARDS
A primary goal of the initiative is to protect vulnerable populations by providing early warning of disease outbreaks—resulting in timely, planned responses that prevent major epidemics.
“This prototype demonstrates that the agency’s requirements were not “impossible” and that the platform works,” said Gladders. “Once built to production standards, Health authorities around the world can take advantage of the wealth of information the system will gather, store and present.”
Because diseases evolve with changing health, social, demographic and environmental conditions, the platform allows users to integrate information from many varying sources to model disease patterns against social and environmental data. At the macro-level, when built, the new disease surveillance platform will allow health authorities to gain a better understanding of disease patterns across the world. Closer to the ground, the system will help public health workers to respond faster to increases in disease risks.
The open integration standards in the system’s architecture will facilitate the inclusion of external data in a full production version, improving risk analysis and identification, and increasing the effectiveness of subsequent health interventions. Communication between separate elements of the system takes place through the centralized ESB. As a result, integrating any additional services into a full production system will require little more than minor configuration changes.
The production version of the system will enable medical personnel, district health managers, national health information managers, and disease surveillance teams to access and share the same information, rapid threat identification and swift response will become possible. In the end, the application will help save lives and the 2Paths prototype demonstrates that the concept is, indeed, possible.
