Case Study: Ethiopia Ministry of Health achieves nationwide disease surveillance and improved accountability with Digium's Asterisk

Ethiopia Ministry of Health - Customer Case Study

Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMHE) sought to replace a slow, paper-based Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) system—limited to about 40 monitored conditions and hampered by manual reporting, delayed analysis, and poor lab access—with a sustainable, scalable IP-based solution. Under PEPFAR-driven priorities for accountability and long-term health system strengthening, FMHE leaders needed a flexible communications platform to enable timely, nationwide disease reporting and coordination with global partners like the CDC.

FMHE selected Asterisk and deployed two Digium Asterisk servers, configured with analog cards and programmed by a Digium partner, to provide web-based telephony, IVR/auto-attendants, and a centralized disease-tracking database. The system enables health workers across Ethiopia to call or access the database for immediate data entry, automated calculations and reports, and faster outbreak analysis and response—improving information sharing, detection capacity, and long-term sustainability of national surveillance.

Ethiopia Ministry of Health

Scott Cechovic

President of Network Services