Enabling descriptive analysis for medicine distribution data related to Neglected Tropical Diseases

Abstract

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in particular the DTIM research group at UPC, and the World Health Organization (WHO) are in a long term collaboration with the department of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD), under the WHO Information System to Control and Eliminate NTDs (WISCENTD) umbrella project. WISCENTD has three subsystems: WHO Integrated Data Platform (WIDP), WHO Integrated Medical Supply System (WIMEDS) and WISCENTD Consolidated Database (WICD). Neglected tropical diseases are a diverse group of tropical infections which largely affects low-income, politically marginalized people living in rural and periurban areas with low visibility and little political voice and with limited access to health care. Severe complications, immense human suffering and death can result if treatment is not provided early and adequately. These diseases affect more than one billion people in 149 countries and despite that are still very often neglected by national health information systems or by surveillance systems that are too weak to ensure good-quality data collection, flow, validation, use, and dissemination. Official data reported by health ministries are, therefore, often incomplete. There is thus an important need to integrate data on NTDs more efficiently and to build resilient health information systems in endemic countries with capacities for data processing, analysis and sharing. There is also a strong need to have a WHO consolidated data platform in order to build a more complete and comprehensive epidemiological picture of NTDs. The main objective of WISCENTD is to provide a unified view of NTD-related data to epidemiologists, researchers, Ministries of Health, and other interested parties, in order to evaluate the current status of diseases throughout the world and predict future trends. Concretely, this thesis aims to solve a lack of well-structured communication and data synchronization between WIMEDS and WICD. There is a need to design and implement data pipelines that would allow for the data to flow and be transformed from one subsystem to another as well as having them synchronized. On the other hand, this project will also focus on helping to provide, to the end users of the WISCENTD system, a unified view of NTD-related data. For that, there is a need to implement support for allowing data exploitation from WICD. Effective and efficient medicine distribution relies on good system design and good management. Connecting WIMEDS with WICD and enabling analysis and visualization of its data is especially important for that purpose and is where this thesis focuses. Specifically, we are enabling analysis and providing visualization of medical distribution data which can help to optimize the medicine distribution and guarantee the quantities needed to treat the affected population.