Abstract:
Dengue is a notifiable communicable disease in Sri Lanka since 1996. Dengue fever spread
rapidly among people living in most of the districts of Sri Lanka. The present notification system of
dengue communicable diseases which is enforced by law is a passive surveillance system carried out
by the public health care professionals. The present notification of communicable disease system is
manual, slow, inefficient, and repetitive all of these lead to handle the dengue related health
problems ineffectively. Thus it is less effective in preventing a spreading epidemic, public health care
professionals and others require an operational support system to help for managing day-to-day
public health responsibilities as well as a method to effectively detect and manage health problems
such as Dengue. On the other hand the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in medical
world has been widely used. To give the information technology touch, a complementary web based
open source software application environment has been developed with minimum implementation
and recurrent costs critical for developing countries like Sri Lanka and named as eDCS: e Dengue
Control System based on the same principles of manual disease surveillance system while taking
steps to provide timely, accurate information in a reliable and useable manner. The eDCS helps to
manage outbreaks through early detection, rapid verification, and appropriate response to Dengue.
It allows health care professionals and citizens to get early awareness about the dengue disease via
Internet or mobile phone and bring them for performing Dengue prevention and controlling
operation through the social media acceleration. The system is initially limited to dengue
communicable disease. It can be easily expanded to other communicable diseases, and non
communicable disease surveillance in future.
