Health@FirstHand (Fully featured, automated Epidemic Disease Management System)

Bandara K.M.P.D.R¹, Dodanwala D.K.B², Gunarathne H.M³, Ranabahu I.R.R.C.D⁴

Engineering undergraduates, Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Preadeniya.

Introduction: In a situation where it is heavily discussed about epidemic disease management as Dengue, it is very important to do the epidemic disease management in an efficient way, saving the valuable time to take the actions to prevent and to reduce the spreading of epidemic diseases.

General Objective: To develop a web based, automated and efficient software solution to the epidemic disease management system by introducing totally new components and enhancing the existing components in the system.

Specific Objectives:

1. Giving doctors a help to ensure the specific epidemic disease, the patient has.
2. Giving past treatments for specific epidemic diseases and their success to decide the best treatment.
3. Analyzing an area for epidemic diseases using maps and charts.
4. A prediction for an epidemic disease up to next 2 months.
5. Automated SMS and e-mail alerting.
6. Giving automatically generated reports monthly and annually.

Methodology: Developing the software using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (with Visual C#) and Microsoft SQL Server as the DBMS. Bing maps and Microsoft Silverlight have been used to do the analysis using maps and charts, respectively.

Results: Developed the expected software with the capability of having huge amount of real time data ensuring patients’ confidentiality. Different levels of health officers have different access levels. The system ensures the speed and reliability.

Conclusion: Health@FirstHand can provide a far better functionality and support in epidemic disease management rather than conventional, manual system. It saves time a lot with real time data, quick analysis and alerting which helps great in further actions such as resource allocation, public awareness, etc.