Tanzania e-IDSR — AI alert triage for national disease surveillance

Tanzania's Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (e-IDSR) system collects disease-alert reports from health facilities across all 26 regions via the DHIS2 platform; as facility reporting improved over 2021-2023, a backlog of over 15,000 unreviewed alerts accumulated, hampering timely outbreak detection.

Clear the alert backlog and speed up triage to prevent recurrence, at a time when outbreak-detection speed is critical.

The Tanzania Ministry of Health, the UDSM DHIS2 Lab, and the U.S. CDC developed a rule-based AI alert-triage tool embedded in DHIS2 that automatically classifies incoming alerts, routing approximately 23% to human epidemiologists and filtering the remainder, with machine-learning enhancements planned; initial rollout covered five high-priority regions, with expansion underway to the remaining 21.

Processing that previously took 36-48 hours per alert batch now occurs in near-real time, and the system successfully cleared 85% of the 15,000-alert backlog following deployment.

The Ministry of Health is expanding the tool nationwide with a target of 95% auto-triage; DHIS2's use in over 70 countries suggests the approach could be adaptable to other low- and middle-income country health systems.