Field Data Collection

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Client

The DOHMH (New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s) is a government department responsible for public health in New York City, US. Within the scope and responsibilities of this department are the inspection of restaurant, issuing dog licences, low and no-cost clinics and birth certificates for newborns. They count with a team of epidemiologists who work on identifying diseases within the city, outbreaks, causes and effects of said diseases and public health threats. This project was developed in partnership with InSTEDD.

The Two Gotham Center in NYC where the DOHMH offices are located

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Requirements & Context

The Community Outreach Teams in the DOHMH works in the field targeting underserved populations that face a unique set of constraints, barriers and challenges when preparing for and recovering from a pandemic with the objective of gathering information on emergency preparedness and response-related data. The agency needed to improve their team’s ability to gather the data in the field, working with electronic surveys and transmitting the information real-time back to the Emergency Operations Center for analysis.

NCY Dept of Health ECHO Project 7:18

Pilot

Adrián and Nicolás traveled to New York City to work at the DOHMH offices to develop the ECHO system. The first days were spent working full time on the development, while the last days they worked along with the DOHMH staff doing user tests and training the teams that would be using the tool.

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Results

Data collected in tablets is sent back to the centralized server, for later export to a Geographical Information System (GIS) for visualization. We integrated different tools from the Open Data Kit (ODK). The work involved redesigning the UI of the existing ODK Collect to improve its usability on Android tablets, reimplementing the ODK Aggregate server on .NET to be deployed in a Windows environment, and integrating authentication with an existing Active Directory server.