MedCloud: Cloud-based disease surveillance and information management system

Outbreaks can overwhelm fragile health systems that lack the tools, infrastructure, policies, and systems to keep communities healthy and safe. Timely detection, preparedness, and appropriate response are essential for limiting both the loss of human life and social economic disaster due to disease outbreaks. Countries must build effective and sustainable disease surveillance and reporting systems that mobilize all levels of the health system-including communities for crisis response. In Pakistan currently, there is no centralize Health Information and Diseases Surveillance System. The current disease surveillance system is a completely manual system, where diseases are being reported through hard copies or print and electronic media. Because of the delayed process, the outbreaks are usually heard through print and electronic media. The ineffective reporting system not only creates problems in managing the countermeasures against a disease outbreak but is likely to cause mass hysteria among the people. In this paper, we propose MedCloud, a cloud-based health management system for disease surveillance and early warning with trend analysis. The proposed system provides a nationwide connected disease surveillance system with the provision of statistical data processing, data validation, and secure backup features. MedCloud is flexibly designed to easily incorporate new plugins. It uses cloud virtual machines to dynamically handle users sessions; thus, can easily and efficiently be accessed using the Internet.