Open-Source Approach to Disease Surveillance: Designing a Cost-Effective, Scalable Solution

It is challenging for lower and middle income countries to develop health information systems due to resource constraints. Here we show how open source community and open source dynamics were used to develop the National Covid Health Information System for the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka. Leveraging open source community and dynamics led to development and implementation of a mature disease surveillance system with zero budget for the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka at the height of the pandemic, wth user acceptance similar to proprietary solutions.