Model-Driven Architecture Based Software Development for Epidemiological Surveillance Systems.

Epidemiological surveillance systems enable collection, analysis and dissemination of information on the monitored disease to different stakeholders. It may be done manually or using a software. Given the poor performances of manual systems, the software approach is generally adopted. Epidemiological surveillance systems are based on existing softwares, softwares developed from scratch given the specifications or softwares provided by a vendor. These solutions are not always suitable because epidemiological surveillance systems evolve quickly (new drugs, new treatment protocols, etc.), leading to software updates, which can take time (while waiting for a new version) and be expensive. In this article, we present the use of the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to model and generate epidemiological surveillance systems. The result is a complete MDA based methodology and tool to develop epidemiological surveillance systems. The tool was used to model and generate softwares that are now used for epidemiological surveillance of tuberculosis in Cameroon.