NATO’s International Security Assistance Force Joint Command oversees preventive medicine and field surveillance in Afghanistan. Medical care and preventive medicine is a national responsibility but some aspects of preventive medicine such as disease surveillance affect all nations and are a shared responsibility.
NATO helps the Army in Afghanistan track Disease and Non-Battle Injuries (DNBI) by using field surveillance to track historical trends. Being aware of disease trends is important for the U.S. Army military commands in theater because it impacts current and future missions.
Disease surveillance also enables deployed medical personnel to be more proactive since epidemiologic data gives the Army information to implement preventive measures before people become ill or injured.
The Army uses the “Medical Situational Awareness in the Theater” (MSAT) web-based application to conduct DNBI surveillance for service members. The system combines information from multiple communities to provide a common operating picture and decision support for the staff of the Combatant and Joint Task Force.
MSAT supplies information on new outbreaks and threats, disease, and non-battle related injuries, physical and psychological trauma, patient tracking, chemical and biological threats, intelligence, command and control data, and tracks unit movements and patient evacuation routes around the globe.
The system produces automated health surveillance reports, provides data on medical events within a short period of time, and provides data on events that occur in remote areas. Using the old manual system of collecting data, DNBI events would not be apparent for at least a week after the possible disease outbreak.
The report MSAT “Business Objects EPINAT” is a report that is basically a template query that allows the user to select the start, end date, and population set variable based on what is needed. The template query focuses on the diseases and injuries that are important for commanders to know about like musculoskeletal disorders. It also includes a long list of diseases that are really important to clinicians, such as influenza-like illness, rabies, and meningitis.
The Army’s MC4 Clinical Operations team has also designed a master report that filters data by regions. These filters are updated by the force health protection officers at each regional command and managed by the health informatics officer at Task Force Medical-Afghanistan