Web-based interactive tool to improve decision-making for malaria elimination in Vietnam

Malaria prevention programs integrated with community health workers have contributed to significant improvement in health outcomes in the GMS including a reduction in malaria case incidence and reduction in mortality rate, particularly in hard-to-reach areas. Vietnam is now among the few countries that achieved the Global Technical Strategy (GTS) 2020 target of a 40% reduction in malaria case incidence and >40% reduction in mortality rate. Nonetheless, the integrations of ecological-level drivers into the surveillance system are essential to strengthen and facilitate the progress to eliminate malaria in the country. The transmission dynamics result in part, from environmental and climatic conditions such as rainfall and temperature. Developing web-based interactive visualization tools that integrate climatic information, will support National Malaria Programs (NMP) in understanding, interrogating, and displaying routine malaria data. Thus, helping to better track transmission patterns and optimize resource allocations for malaria control.

The electronic Communicable Diseases System (eCDS) dashboard is used by the NMPs in the GMS for decision making. However, eCDs lack a ready means of data visualization and is prone to incomplete data, thereby leading to underestimation of malaria risk. Studies have suggested that the development of web-based digital decision-support tools that integrate routine surveillance data with real-time climatic information, while also accounting for incomplete data with appropriate statistical techniques, may contribute to improving decision-making and implementing cost-effective malaria control measures. Our proposed project aims to create a pilot version of such a system, thus providing an interactive web-based dashboard that integrates malaria case reports, climatic information, and predictive model results while minimizing the lag time from data collection to dissemination.

This project will involve researchers in Australia as well as policymakers, epidemiologists, and clinicians in Vietnam NIMPE, National Institute of Malariology, Parasitology and Entomology. Ongoing research collaborations with these groups will enable us to easily obtain approval to use routine malaria surveillance data such as malaria case reports, a list of villages that have cases with GPS, and intervention from Vietnam NIMPE. Environmental and climatic data will be obtained from the Google Earth Engine platform. These environmental covariates will consist primarily of products derived from remotely sensed imagery and ingested within Earth Engine, thus eliminating the need for custom data acquisition and preprocessing steps. Many environmental datasets will be explored for their utility to this project, including the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) and land surface temperature data from the Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM). Monthly reported malaria cases, each containing malaria species and patient characteristics such as age group and sex, will be provided by our collaborating researchers at NIMPE, Vietnam. Health facilities such as clinics, health centres, and district hospitals are providing malaria diagnostic and treatment services. Routine malaria surveillance data collated from these health facilities with eCDS-MMs are provided to district health offices and the provincial health department. The provincial office collates the data and reports them to the NIMPEs every month.

Digital Tools
Surveillance

Jun 2022 — Oct 2023

$15,000

Vietnam

Australian Centre for Research Excellence in Malaria Elimination (ACREME)