According to reports, the fight to eliminate malaria is going to require surveillance to be the backbone to effectively fight the disease. Constant decisions have to be made on how to find malaria parasites, how to eliminate the parasites from human populations, and then how to prevent parasites from coming back.
Advances in digital and mobile technologies and the increased reach of mobile phone networks puts the goal of timely, affordable, geo-located reporting within reach. There is a real need to transform malaria surveillance in a way that can accelerated national and regional elimination efforts.
Despite the knowledge that the role of surveillance is vital in malaria elimination, the full potential of available information communication technology, data systems, harmonization, analytics, and visualization has not yet been effectively applied to the challenge of malaria elimination.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in their “Grand Challenges Explorations” program on September 13, 2016, issued the funding opportunity titled “Design New Solutions to Data Integration for Malaria Elimination (Round 18)”. The Foundation is looking for proposals that focus on innovation in interoperability solutions to reduce the time for data harmonization by automation or skill set simplification.
The Foundation is specifically focused on proposals that will:
- Develop a novel algorithm that pulls together data or malaria cases and information from health facilities
- Integrate data derived from advanced identification and tagging methods using remote sensing platforms
- Use ICT to incorporate new data sourced
- Use heuristic or machine learning algorithms for data validation
- Develop a data integration method that is optimized and scalable for malaria elimination settings
- Development of interoperable software modules for popular malaria elimination or other global health platforms
Go to http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities for information on the funding for proposal “Design New Solutions to Data Integration for Malaria Elimination (Round 18). For application instructions go to http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/application-instructions.