Managing Director of InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia
| Selected winner: | Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD) |
| Solution name: | National Hotline System for Improving Infectious Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Response |
| Origin of the winner: | Cambodia |
Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD) is a social innovation organization focused on collaborative design, user-led innovation, building and rolling out technology-based solutions for improving public health, and development. For for more than 10 years InSTEDD has collaborated with partners and ministries of health in the Mekong Basin Region to strengthen digital disease detection and response.
National Hotline System for Improving Infectious Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Response
Cambodia’s 115 health hotline is a system tool that aims to improve disease detection, expedite response times to illnesses, and inform the population about possible threats.
It allows the general public to easily make a call via mobile phone and report an outbreak signal or obtain information posted by the Communicable Disease Control Department of the Ministry of Health Cambodia.
At the same time, health workers can simply dial the toll-free hotline to provide the weekly infectious disease report. The hotline provides a mechanism to improve the timeliness and reduces operational cost of data collection from all health centres nationwide.
The hotline was credited for identifying 90% of the early COVID-19 cases in the country and was the principal means of providing timely information to the public. Once enhanced to enable contact tracing, the hotline sent contact tracing automatic calls to over a million contacts during COVID-19. (link to case study)
The Challenge winners are solely responsible for their contributions and views. They do not necessarily reflect those of WHO. In no event shall WHO be responsible for the accuracy of information shared by any of the participants. These solutions were judged for their merits as novel, creative solutions but no specific technology assessment was applied, nor any endorsement in practice should be implied.