In 2023, ZNPHI began a new initiative focusing on Collaborative Surveillance (CS). CS is a way of working that involves multi-disciplinaries, within and beyond health sectors, coming together to enhance public health intelligence for evidence-based decision-making. ZNPHI participated in a 2-day design sprint facilitated by Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) to enhance their cholera outbreak situation report. Pioneered at Google in 2010, and now popular for designing technology applications, a sprint involves bringing a small group of key stakeholders together to select a high-priority problem to address and design and prototype a product in a short span of time. Activities include storyboarding workflows and data flows, identifying user personas, and demonstrations of how the prototype would lead to a clear action plan. The sprint team included staff from ZNPHI, Ministry of Health, US CDC, and Lusaka Provincial Health Office. We used participatory methods to draw on ZNPHI’s experience with the recent cholera outbreak to determine what information is available and critical for decision-makers while allocating resources. By leveraging the design sprint methodology, ZNPHI quickly generated an enhanced cholera situation report prototype based on inputs public health officials had gathered from members of the community, government, and stakeholders. The situation report also considered data sources outside epidemiological and laboratory data which will ultimately be useful in defining the data requirement and requisite data architecture. Based on the prototype, ZNPHI began implementing the DHIS2-based daily case count reporting system, which will provide timely key data inputs to the new situation report. Design sprint methodology can be an important tool in helping public health agencies quickly innovate information products to be more informative for decision-makers. It can also serve as the basis for prioritizing data requirements when building infrastructure for triangulating epidemiological, laboratory, and multi-sectoral data.

Cephas Sialubanje is a medical doctor specialised in medical epidemiology. He holds an MPH from Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and a PhD in epidemiology from Maastricht University (The Netherlands). He has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in global health at Harvard University School of Public Health, USA. He is an associate professor of epidemiology and dean for the School of Public Health at Levy Mwanawasa Medical University, Lusaka, Zambia. He is currently the director of strategic planning and information management at the Zambia National Public Health Institute in charge of research and collaborative surveillance. He has served as a principal investigator on various locally and internationally funded research projects and has more than 30 publications that have been cited more than 700 times in various reputable international peer-reviewed journals including BMJ Open, BMC, PLOS ONE, and others. His h-index is 11. He has been serving as an academic editor and peer reviewer for several reputable journals.