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Curbing Disease Outbreaks: Connecting Remote Communities to Health Surveillance Systems

Use Case

Facing the challenge of detecting disease outbreaks in remote communities with weak infrastructure, the Norwegian Red Cross implemented a community-based surveillance (CBS) system.

By deploying a hardware SMS gateway from SMSEagle, the organization enabled volunteers to send health-risk reports via SMS even where internet or data was unavailable, thus bridging the gap between local community input and cloud-based analytics and enabling faster public-health responses

“Using reports from community volunteers… we collect, analyse and interpret information on local health risks to identify, prevent and respond to potential disease outbreaks.”
Nikolai Riedel
Technology Lead for Community-Based Surveillance (CBS), Norwegian Red Cross

About the company

The Norwegian Red Cross, founded in 1865 and based in Oslo with approximately 150,000 volunteers, is part of the international Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Its mission is to protect life, health and human dignity in some of the most challenging environments worldwide.

Company website: www.rodekors.no/en

Challenge

  • Community volunteers operating in remote areas lacked internet connectivity and used basic phones, making modern app-based data capture infeasible.

  • Traditional data collection via paper forms or web-forms was slow, labour-intensive and error-prone, causing delays in outbreak detection.

  • Most cloud-based SMS gateways did not support local SIM cards or local carrier numbers in target regions, limiting reach and local relevance.

  • The process needed to link local network providers, volunteers, and the central CBS web application in a way that provided rapid, actionable data to public health authorities.

Solution & Deployment

  • The Norwegian Red Cross deployed the SMSEagle hardware SMS gateway to receive SMS messages from community volunteers and forward them to the cloud-based CBS platform.

  • Using local SIM cards and direct connection to the cellular network, the gateway bypassed internet requirements, enabling message delivery in low-connectivity areas.

  • The SMS gateway integrated with the CBS workflow as the bridge: volunteer reports → beacon SMS → SMSEagle gateway → CBS platform → health-authority alert.

  • The solution supported GSM, 3G and 4G networks with full wave-band coverage, giving flexibility to choose carriers and optimize cost while ensuring resilient connectivity.

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Results & Benefits

  • Communities with limited access to internet or data now have direct SMS connectivity for health-risk reporting, enabling earlier detection of potential outbreaks.

  • The programme now effectively bridges the information gap between grassroots reporting and public-health systems, supporting faster response to emerging health threats.

  • The solution’s independence from cloud-only infrastructure increases the resilience of the surveillance system in hard-to-reach regions.

  • The Norwegian Red Cross can now collect, interpret and act on health-risk data more rapidly, helping to prevent localised outbreaks from escalating into epidemics.

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