Background

This provides a high-level overview of the country's TB programme, starting with the TB disease burden in the country using the latest data up to 2020 and other key indicators regarding TB care and prevention. This is then followed by the country’s vision and commitments indicated in its latest National Strategic Plan (NSP). The background also gives a high-level overview of the enabling environment and digital ecosystem, which have a direct influence on the adaptation of digital TB surveillance tools and their scale-up within the country. This overview includes influencing factors such as a country's digital capacity, Internet penetration, mobile penetration, and so on. The background also provides a brief summary of the current status of digital TB surveillance tools used in the country, whether these tools capture case-based or aggregated data, and the level of data collection (i.e. facility vs. district vs. provincial, etc.).

Brief of digital TB surveillance system

This section provides a comprehensive snapshot of the digital TB surveillance tool that is being used or scaled up to a national scale. It is important to keep in mind that many countries have multiple systems for capturing TB data that might be deployed at different scales (i.e. proof of concept or pilot stage); however, this section only considers the system that is used for national reporting of TB cases. This section captures a narrative about the national system currently in place, the granularity of data collected (case-based or aggregated, the lowest level of data collection, country capacity, ownership of the platform and other related aspects).

Success stories

The success stories attempt to capture the most innovative components and major achievements in a country in terms of its conceptualization and development of a digital TB surveillance system. These stories can range from highlights of specific innovative modules such as contact-tracing modules, presumptive screening modules, or CLM modules that complement the main TB surveillance system to details of how countries have enabled integration of the digital TB surveillance system with external systems such as GeneXpert, laboratory information system or logistics management/medicine inventory systems.

Private sector

This section provides information on how countries are leveraging their digital TB surveillance systems to enable and improve private sector notification and the current private sector notification status.

Enabling environment

This section provides a narrative about the enabling environment and digital ecosystem, which have a direct influence on the adaptation of digital TB surveillance tools and their scale-up in the country. The narrative discusses influencing factors such as the country’s digital capacity, Internet penetration, mobile penetration and so on.

Available resources

This section provides an overview of the current funding resources available to the country that can potentially be leveraged for digital case-based TB surveillance. However, this section by no means provides the entire NTP budget available or future funding expected. Therefore, this section should only be used as an additional piece of information and not for any future budget considerations.

Cascade of care

This section provides a snapshot of the different components of the entire continuum of TB care and a person's journey from presumptive TB screening and testing through to treatment, treatment support and adherence, treatment outcome, post-treatment follow-up and contact tracing. This section also captures how data are captured at each stage along the continuum of care (digitally or manually and, if digitally, whether case-based or aggregated). It is important to note that this section captures whether the country has developed modules to capture data at each of these stages and not necessarily whether it has scaled these up to the national level.

Data variables

This section provides a high-level overview of what data variables are captured by the national programme and whether these variables are captured through a digital medium. The table is colour-coded for easy comprehension of whether the data captured are manual or digital and, if digital, whether they are case-based (indicated by a green tick mark) or aggregated (indicated by a yellow tick mark).

Indicators

Very similar to the data variable section, this provides a high-level overview of what indicators are reported by the national programme and whether these indicators are reported through a digital medium. The table is colour-coded for easy comprehension of whether the data reported are manual or digital and, if digital, whether they are case-based or aggregated.

Roadmap

This section provides a pictorial representation of the national programme’s digital TB surveillance journey. It captures key milestones and achievements by the NTP from the inception of the digital TB notification tools to their current status and the programme’s future vision and plans. This section tries to capture as concretely as possible specific modules or digital components that the NTP is planning to develop to further strengthen TB surveillance.

Ancillary systems

The table provides a compilation of various complementary digital tools (identified with the NTP) that are being used in the country to support TB treatment adherence, logistics management, laboratory record-keeping, result dissemination, CLM, pharmacovigilance and contact-tracing. These digital tools are further mapped with the primary channel of data inflow, details of the development and supporting agencies, and the scale of implementation for each of the identified technology solutions.

Challenges

Based on the country inputs, this section provides an account of the key challenges faced by the country in terms of planning, implementing, monitoring, integrating and/or scaling up the technology interventions. As a common indication, the challenges encountered by a country are most often dependent on the stage of development and implementation of the country’s TB surveillance system.

Vision

These are a few key areas of focus for the country’s NTP, as discussed in the various steps of this assessment. As a general practice, the points included here are further aligned with the suggested strategies and directives of the NSP and important milestones for establishing a case-based TB notification and surveillance system

Budget requirement

Based on the country's feedback and recommendations, this section provides an estimate of the budget required to address the challenges and make progress towards the vision over the next three years. The budget is broken down to include specifics for hardware and infrastructure, software development, and capacity-building at various administrative levels of the health system.

Recommendation

To address the gaps and challenges identified through the assessment, this section provides a list of country-specific recommendations with timelines for execution over the next three years. These recommendation points have also been aligned with the system of choice and the suggested efforts of the TB programme (as per the NSP), and thus are projected to meet the broader vision for establishing a well functioning real-time digital case-based surveillance system for TB in the country.