Software Tools to Facilitate Community-Based Surveillance: A Scoping Review

Public health surveillance traditionally occurs at a health facility; however, there is growing concern that this provides only partial and untimely health information. Community-based surveillance (CBS) enables early warning and the mobilization of early intervention and response to disease outbreaks. CBS is a method of surveillance that can monitor a wide range of information directly from community members. CBS can be done using short message service, phone calls, paper forms, or a specialized software tool. No scoping review of the available software tools with the capability for CBS exists in the literature. This review aims to map software tools that can be used for CBS in both community health programs and emergency settings and demonstrate their use cases.

We conducted a scoping review of academic literature and supplemental resources and conducted qualitative interviews with stakeholders working with digital community health and surveillance tools.

All of the tools reviewed have features necessary to support the reporting process of CBS; only 3 (CommCare, Community Health Toolkit, and DHIS2 Tracker) provided all 10 attributes included in the mapping. AVADAR and Nyss were the only tools designed specifically for CBS and for use by volunteers, while the other tools were designed for community health workers and have a broader use case.

The findings demonstrate that several software tools are available to facilitate public health surveillance at the community level. In the future, emphasis should be put on contextualizing these tools to meet a country's public health needs and promoting institutionalization and ownership by the national health system. There is also an opportunity to explore improvements in event-based surveillance at the community level.