VODAN-Africa Health System is being deployed across 88 health facilities in 8 African countries. The leadership of the VODAN-Africa project decided this in its Tuesday meeting on April 12th, 2022. This is an achievement in alignment with the mission of VODAN-Africa to generate continuous, real-time, high velocity clinical observational patient data from resource-limited communities that have not been well represented in digital health data. The key feature is that the data produced remains in the health facility only. It will not leave the health facility. Since the data is machine-actionable the input of the data only happens once; in the deployable architecture, the data is used for four parallel use cases.

“This is an ethical data infrastructure, fully compliant with the guidelines of FAIR Data, GDPR, and local regulation. I am proud that this international team has created a pandemic early warning infrastructure, we will be able to pick up pandemic trends early, localize them and work with local health authorities to act on the data” said Mirjam van Reisen, chief investigator at Leiden University Medical Centre and Leiden Global, leading a team of African scientists.

Mariam Basajja, Ruduan Plug, and Aliya Aktau from Leiden Advanced Institute for Computer Science (LIACS) and Leiden University Medical Centre brought the overall architecture together. Mekelle University and Ayder Hospital Scientists Samson Amare Yohannes and Getu Tadelle realized the key features of the architecture. Kampala International University (KIU) based scientists Oluwole Olumuyiwa Afolabi and Ezra Mwesigwa realized the dashboard that can be utilized within the facility and across the 88 facilities where VODAN-Africa is now being deployed. Putu Hadi Purnama Jati led the research into the adoption strategy of the innovation to Health Facilities, which sign a Data Use Agreement to ensure data is used in accordance with all regulations.