Veterinary emergency response management system

Abstract

Currently there is difficulty in containing animal disease outbreaks which facilitates disease spread to more areas, increased loss of animal lives and straining control efforts and making overall disease management expensive as this is mainly due to untimely submission of disease incidences from farm- ers to responsible veterinary officers/doctors and absence of a convenient platform to bridge the gap between farmers. Our main objective was to develop a reliable, effective, efficient and transpar- ent Veterinary Emergency Response Management System to eliminate the above challenges. The system enables remote scheduling of appointments, information sharing, mobile payments etc. between farmers and Veterinary Officials/ doctors as they can be accessed both online and offline. For the success and understanding of the system, qualitative and quanti- tative data was collected through interview, observation, questionnaires and documentation review. The system was implemented using a number of tools and technologies such as MySQL, HTML5, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, Bootstrap, jQuery, Ajax and the system was designed using context diagrams,DFDs. Data analysis was done using SPSS and the findings showed that whereas most of the respondents both the farmers and doctors were willing to embrace the culture of digitalizing the Veterinary Sector. Some desirable features were suggested for inclusion in the Veterinary Emergency Response Management System such as QR Code, GPS location, Category drug shops, Consultation, Online profile of Veterinary officials. The developed System bridges the gap that exists between farmers and vet- erinary officials in Uganda by providing a platform for information sharing, scheduling appointments, making mobile payments, offline access, built in reminders, electronic medical record generation, text messaging, farmer in- teraction and advanced reporting.