The eye disease trachoma has been in the news a lot lately. Pfizer recently celebrated their 500 millionth donated dose (that's right, we said 500 MILLION) to fight the disease, which is the world's leading infectious cause of preventable blindness. The effort to effectively map the disease (the Global Trachoma Mapping Project, or GTMP) examined 2.6 million people in 29 countries and identified 100 million people globally who live in endemic areas. It's amid all of this that we have the relatively easy task of building a cloud-based solution to organize all the data! This is called the GET2020 database ("Global Elimination of Trachoma by 2020"). This week marks a big milestone in the rollout of this program in that it's now online and being used to manage applications for drug donations, the associated data with those applications, and dozens of other data points that The World Health Organization and The International Trachoma Initiative need to work with Ministries of Health in endemic countries to effectively manage this disease.

Why a cloud-based solution?

The most common database in use in the Global Health community is usually a combination of Access and Excel. These tools usually perform more than adequately -- when your database is small, your user base is in the same room, and the types of data you collect is simple. However, we're finding more and more that is not the world we live in. As is often the case, databases are complex, your user base is spread around the world, and you need something that can perform more analytically. Access and Excel have a hard time keeping up with these demands. ITI recognized this and had the foresight to start looking at a complete overhaul of their system. Their needs were pretty straight forward:

• They wanted something that could be widely accessible -- whether the users were at ITI HQ in Atlanta, at the World Health Organization in Geneva, or in a remote part of the world.
• They needed a tool that could handle processing of applications from countries seeking assistance (if you thought applying for financial aid in college was a chore, you should see these things). They contain thousands of data points often across hundreds of geographic regions. Doing it by hand was tedious and prone to human error.
• They needed a wide variety of different roles -- some users need to see certain data points, while others needed full access. Common functionality that Access / Excel is not cut out to handle.
• Lastly, this tool needed to organize the data. Reporting, mapping, and supply chain are all things that naturally become much easier once data is centralized and organized.

Standard Code + ITI

We have the good fortune of being located just a few miles from an epicenter of global health -- Atlanta is home to the Centers for Disease Control, Emory University, The Task Force for Global Health, and of course, the awesome team at ITI. Since we already had a relationship with The Task Force (we helped build the aforementioned GTMP project), and since we've been working with cloud software for a number of years, we were a natural partner to help take this massive project on. MJ from our team took the lead on this project. He did a crash course in trachoma terminology and exporting Access databases. Along the way, he invented a handful of really nifty tools that we'll open source and describe in further eye-popping technical detail later. We worked very closely with the ITI team for close to a year to bring this first phase of the tool online. Since we're just down the street, we would often work at The Task Force office, side-by-side with the team to sort through the troves of data (somewhere at The Task Force office there should be a desk with MJ's name on it). Often the ITI team would come to our office (they were kind enough to look the other way when using our ping pong table as a desk). All of this led to a cohesive sense of team which is super important when developing something this sophisticated and time consuming.

Stats

My favorite section of any blog entry -- the stats! 58 - Total countries' data included in this system (that's almost 1/3 of the countries in the UN) 5,683 - Total number of geographic regions currently managed by the system. 96 - Total number of "indicators" for each country. Think of these as facts and figures about the disease 545,000 - Total number of data points per year that this system will manage. We're looking forward to continuing to work with our friends at ITI to make this a world-class application that rids the world of a terrible disease.