Project Details
Title:
Sentry (Healthcare)
Details:
Ghana's disease surveillance system is built around hospitals and laboratories. By the time a clinician sees enough cases to trigger a report, and that report travels through district and regional health directorates to Ghana Health Service, an outbreak is already 2–3 weeks old. The window for early containment has closed.
Community pharmacies are where Ghanaians go first before they see a doctor, before a diagnosis is made. When a respiratory infection spreads through Madina, families buy amoxicillin and throat lozenges from their neighbourhood pharmacy days before any hospital records a spike. That signal exists in dispensing data. It has never been captured.
Ghana has over 3,000 licensed community pharmacies. None are connected to the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system. Their dispensing records are rich, real-time, geographically distributed and sit unused on local computers or paper ledgers while GHS waits for hospital reports.
The consequence is predictable: late detection, delayed response, preventable deaths. The 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak demonstrated across West Africa what happens when surveillance gaps go unfilled. Ghana is not immune to the next outbreak.
The data exists. The pharmacies exist. The infrastructure to connect them to public health authorities does not yet.
Early outbreak detection. Identify disease signals from community pharmacy dispensing patterns 14–18 days before hospital surveillance systems would typically trigger a GHS notification giving public health authorities a meaningful head start on containment. 2. Fill the community pharmacy surveillance gap. Connect Ghana's 3,000+ licensed community pharmacies currently invisible to the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system into a federated intelligence network that anonymises and aggregates dispensing data without exposing patient or business information. 3. Reduce the burden on health authorities. Replace manual IDSR form filling, phone-based reporting, and delayed data entry with automated signal detection, structured DHIS2-compatible exports, and direct WhatsApp dispatch to GHS officers so the right person gets actionable intelligence at the right time with zero additional administrative work for the pharmacy.
Aduru Sentinel is designed around Ghana's existing health infrastructure, not against it. It pushes signals directly into DHIS2, the platform GHS already uses for disease surveillance, eliminating the need for parallel systems or new workflows. Alert dispatches follow the IDSR format Ghana Health Service officers are trained on, with signature blocks ready for District Health Directorate submission. The solution accounts for Ghana's connectivity constraints; an offline cache keeps the dashboard functional for seven days without internet, critical for pharmacies in peri-urban and low-connectivity areas. Drug categorisation is mapped to common Ghanaian dispensing patterns including antimalarials, Harmattan-season respiratory drugs, and antihypertensives that dominate community pharmacy sales in Greater Accra. The pilot data comes from KAM AID Pharmacy Ltd., an operational three-branch network in Greater Accra, giving the solution genuine Ghanaian dispensing data rather than synthetic or imported datasets.