Authors:

Miguel A. SanJoaquin, Theresa J. Allain, Malcolm E. Molyneux, Laura Benjamin, Dean B. Everett, Oliver Gadabu, Camilla Rothe, Patrick Nguipdop, Moses Chilombe, Lawrence Kazembe, Servace Sakala, Andrew Gonani, Robert S. Heyderman

Abstract:

• Disease burden in developing countries is difficult to quantify—data are sparse and their quality is difficult to assess.
• Health care planning and the monitoring and evaluation of interventions are hindered by a lack of systematically collected data.
• An electronic surveillance system was set up to gather morbidity and mortality data from adult patients in a large referral hospital of Malawi (Surveillance Programme of IN-patients and Epidemiology [SPINE]), serving as a model for other potential sentinel implementation sites.
• SPINE collects individual-level demographic and clinical data from thousands of admissions, thereby informing patient care, policy planning, and research.
• We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of establishing these types of systems and the challenges that were overcome to implement SPINE.

Journal:

PLoS Med

Year:

2013

PMID:

23554578

PMCID:

PMC3595207

Hyperlink:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3595207/