Jean-Claude Tshilenge-Mfumu - Proposal of an Organizational Method to Monitor Epidemic and Chronic Diseases’ propagation:Application to DRC’s Health Care System

Monitoring the spread of epidemic diseases is a major concern in the area of public health. In 17th century, a scientific discipline called epidemiology was born. It is defined as the study of the distribution of health problems and their determinants in human populations and the application of this study to the prevention of health problems. There are two modes of surveillance: active and passive. In active surveillance, the investigator will seek information from participants, is practiced during large cross-sectional surveys which involve sampling the population. In passive mode, surveillance is carried out on the basis of information that the health facilities send back to the health agencies. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the health authorities adopted and adapted in 2011 an IDSR (Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response) strategy proposed by the World Health Organization in favor of the low-income and middle-income countries. The implementation of this strategy failed due to the lack of an organizational framework that we would propose through our research work. We propose an organizational innovation method called CHICKEN whose process and object models contribute to the problems raised by health professionals in the health pyramid of the DRC namely to : (i) improve the quality of health data by setting up process models that can be reused by health workers to properly identify and confirm the suspected cases of a pathology; (ii) set up analysis tools to detect the determinants of epidemics according to their periodicity in time and space while ensuring automatic reminders to health units in lack of data; and (iii) facilitate the cooperation between actors that can improve or optimize the anticipation of the spread of epidemic diseases.