I’m been talking with staff in a MoH who are interested in the VPD Tracker but want it to cover all IDSR immediately reportable diseases/events, which includes around 7 additional types of disease/events. It seems like other countries who have implemented the VPD Tracker have taken a similar approach to reduce the siloing of vertical programs (in this case integrating the EPI program with broader disease surveillance needs).
Two questions:
Will additional diseases/event types be added to the VPD Tracker?
Is there a repository for the additional diseases/events other countries have added, so that we could see what work has already been done and avoid “reinventing the wheel”. For example, if a country has already added diarrhea with blood to the VPD Tracker, could we take their code as a starting point?
We don’t have any immediate plans to add additional diseases to the VPD tracker as there is quite a bit at this point an implementation can learn from to add the diseases they need
I think this would have to be discussed on a case-by-base basis, we could perhaps try to see what is available more broadly in terms of adaptations so far
I think it might add lot of value to inventory what diseases/events have already been added for different countries. The problem is that in the country where I am working there is an EPI unit and a surveillance unit. It would be good to reduce siloing and include all IDSR diseases so that the VPD app is not just an EPI unit app. It relates to ownership and will impact sustainability if the application is useful beyond EPI and isn’t owned by EPI. But it seems daunting to have to add 5-7 more diseases to the VPD application, and if that has already been done by others it would feel far more manageable.
Hi Bram, the use of the term IDSR for the aggregate package relates to the inclusion of typical notifiable diseases, inclusive of VPDs and non-VPDs (15 epidemic-prone diseases currently included in this package). Meanwhile, the VPD case-based surveillance package currently covers only 9 vaccine preventable diseases – though we hope to expand this integrated tracker design to cover additional non-VPDs in the future and that countries would be able to customize according to notifiable disease reporting policies in country. Hope that helps to clear up the distinction which is not based on data model, but on the diseases incorporated into each package in its current state. Indeed, ideally these modules complement each other as countries advance their system maturity toward full coverage of case-based systems which remains challenging in many contexts.