Design thinking during a health emergency: building a national data collection and reporting system
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RESEARCH IN PRACTICE
Open Access
Design thinking during a health emergency: building a national data collection and reporting system Kara N. Durski1,2* , Shalini Singaravelu1, Dhamari Naidoo1, Mamoudou Harouna Djingarey3, Ibrahima Soce Fall3, Ali Ahmed Yahaya3, Bruce Aylward1, Michael Osterholm2 and Pierre Formenty1
Abstract Background: Design thinking allows challenging problems to be redefined in order to identify alternative usercenter strategies and solutions. To address the many challenges associated with collecting and reporting data during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, we used a design thinking approach to build the Global Ebola Laboratory Data collection and reporting system. Main text: We used the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. This approach offers a flexible model which focuses on empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. A strong focus of the methodology includes end-users’ feedback from the beginning to the end of the process. This is an iterative methodology that continues to adapt according to the needs of the system. The stages do not need to be sequential and can be run in parallel, out of order, and repeated as necessary. Design thinking was used to develop a data collection and reporting system, which contains all laboratory data from the three countries during one of the most complicated multi-country outbreaks to date. The data collection and reporting system was used to orient the response interventions at the district, national, and international levels within the three countries including generating situation reports, monitoring the epidemiological and operational situations, providing forecasts of the epidemic, and supporting Ebola-related research and the Ebola National Survivors programs within each country. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates the numerous benefits that arise when using a design thinking methodology during an outbreak to solve acute challenges within the national health information system and the authors recommend it’s use during future complex outbreaks. Keywords: Design thinking, Information Management System, Disease outbreaks, Data systems
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20, 1202 Genève, Switzerland 2 University of Minnesota School of Public Health, 420 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in
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