Development of SMS-Based of Outbreak Local Monitoring System at Banjar District Health Office, Province of South Borneo in the Year of 2008
Abstract
Maulidin Noor, Hari Purnomo, Anis Fuad
Background:Infectious disease outbreaks have become a public health concern in Indonesia. Furthermore, disease outbreaks arouse the increasing of national morbidity and mortality rates, also bring the impacts to social, economic, and tourism sectors. As the early awareness to diseases, health centers apply a surveillance reporting system including reporting format for local monitoring system to the outbreaks. Nevertheless, the implementation of the system in several districts found some barriers which affect to quality of the outputs. In Banjar District, one of districts in South Borneo Province which has 288 villages, 16 sub districts, and 23 health centers, the report delivery from health centers was not timely occasionally. Thus, this problem affected to the reports’ accuracy and completeness.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to find out the solution in order the local area monitoring report of disease outbreaks was accurate and timely so that it could be used for early awareness system of disease outbreak.
Methods: This was a descriptive-qualitative study. The analysis unit consisted of health center surveillance program officer, district epidemiology officer, head division of Infectious Disease Eradication, and Program Manager of surveillance. The data were collected through document review, observation, and interview. An action research procedure was used to analyze the data qualitatively.
Results: The study found that the manual reporting system in health centers was the cause of problems related to the reports’ accuracy and timeliness in delivering to District Health Office.
Conclusion: The SMS-based reporting system was considered able to improve the report’s quality, timeliness and completeness, cost efficiency, and to guarantee the data security. In addition, this system was also easy to use by the users in health centers as well as in the district health office.
Keywords: outbreak, local monitoring system, quick reporting, SMS