Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Sep 12, 2019
Date Accepted: Jan 27, 2020
Digital Health Global Goods Maturity Assessment of the Surveillance Outbreak Response Management & Analysis System (SORMAS)
ABSTRACT
Background:
Many countries, intervention programs, and non-governmental organizations have adopted different digital health tools for different health-related problems. Some of these digital health tools are built and deployed as pilot projects for a short period. This creates a sustainability problem within the framework of these countries that have implemented them. The concept of global goods stems from a framework influencing health policies to support technologies, which are meant to assist Government agencies and policymakers in launching, scaling and sustaining digital health innovations. Digital Square developed a global good maturity model (GGMM) for digital health tools, which engages the digital health community to identify areas of investment for global goods. SORMAS is an open-source mobile and web application software, which we developed to enable health workers to notify the health departments about new cases of epidemic-prone diseases, detect outbreaks and manage outbreak response at the same time.
Objective:
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the maturity of SORMAS using the digital square global goods maturity model and to describe the applicability of the GGMM on the use case of SORMAS and to identify opportunities for improvements of the system
Methods:
We evaluated SORMAS using the GGMM version 1.0 indicators to measure the development of SORMAS. We scored SORMAS based on all the GGMM indicator scores. We described how we used the GGMM to guide the development of SORMAS during the study period. GGMM contains 15 sub-indicators grouped into the following core indicators: (1) global utility, (2) community support and (3) software maturity.
Results:
The assessment of SORMAS through the GGMM from November 2017 to October 2019 resulted in full completion of all sub-scores (33% in 2017, 70% in 2018 and 100% in 2019). SORMAS reached the full score of the global good maturity model for digital health software tools by accomplishing all 10 points for each of the three indicators on global utility, community support, and software maturity
Conclusions:
To our knowledge, SORMAS is the first eHealth tool for disease surveillance that has accomplished the full 100% score and also the first outbreak response management tool to do so. While some conceptual changes would allow for further improvements of the system, the global goods maturity model has already a strong supportive effect on developing software towards global goods maturity
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