The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), through the Institute for Global Health Sciences (IGHS) and in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), worked closely with the Jordan Ministry of Health (JMoH) to strengthen the country’s public health surveillance systems, specifically the Jordan Integrated Electronic Reporting System (JIERS). This collaboration has focused mainly on enhancing the Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) component, which captures and analyzes information from sources such as media reports, community alerts, and rumors to identify signals of potential outbreaks or public health risks before they escalate into emergencies. Currently, EBS prioritizes respiratory diseases in healthcare facilities, with plans to expand to an all-hazards approach in future phases.
The Multi-phase Surveillance Strengthening approach began in May 2023 with a comprehensive evaluation of JIERS, where the UCSF team and partners including CDC and Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) Global, assessed the system’s functionality, structure, and user experience with a focus on reporting forms and notification workflows. This assessment provided important insights into the strengths and challenges of the system. While JIERS was actively used and supported multi-program data collection, key areas for improvement were identified such as data quality issues, system bugs and the need for stronger dashboards to support timely public health decision making.
Strengthening JIERS involved ongoing technical work through regular virtual and in-person collaboration sessions between the UCSF Informatics Hub and the surveillance and Information Technology (IT) teams. These sessions focused on troubleshooting system issues, implementing enhancements, and aligning technical solutions with operational needs. This work was led and facilitated by Jordanian software developer Mohammad Abu Meshref, who played a central role in coordinating efforts and implementing system improvements.
Building on JMoH’s needs identified, efforts were launched in April 2024 focusing on strengthening how data is used. UCSF supported the JMoH team in applying best practices in data visualization, helping define roles, responsibilities, and workflows for dashboard development. This was an important step toward ensuring that data collected through JIERS could be translated into actionable insights for surveillance teams and decision-makers.
Recognizing that sustainable system strengthening requires strong local technical capacity, UCSF also supported the JMoH IT team through two intensive, in-person coding workshops focused on system development technologies (e.g.Angular and .NET Core). These trainings were designed to equip the team with the skills needed to manage, maintain, and further develop JIERS independently, supporting long-term system sustainability.
By July 2025, the collaboration expanded to building analytical capacity within the Ministry. UCSF facilitated a hands-on workshop on R for epidemic intelligence, using EBS data to train participants in data cleaning, analysis, indicator calculation, and visualization. Participants developed practical skills to generate key surveillance indicators, such as timeliness metrics, and create visualizations that support outbreak detection and response, highlighting a shift from data collection to meaningful data use.
A major milestone was reached in October 2025 with a dedicated handover workshop focused on sustainability. The workshop built the JMoH IT team’s capacity to manage, troubleshoot, and enhance JIERS independently. The team worked hands-on with the system: running it locally, fixing bugs, and implementing new features, ensuring that knowledge transfer was practical and directly applicable.
Together, this step wise strategy strengthened Jordan’s ability to detect and respond to public health threats more effectively. By improving system functionality, enhancing dashboards, and building local capacity, JIERS has become a more robust and sustainable surveillance platform. As the system continues to grow, expanding EBS beyond respiratory diseases to a broader all-hazards approach will further enhance Jordan’s early warning capabilities and support more informed public health action.
Read more about our Global Health Security Work
- Strengthening Early Warning Systems: Rebuilding Egypt’s Event-Based Surveillance System
- Building Regional Capacity Across Borders: AUB’s Cross-Border Public Health Surveillance Course
- Connecting Research to Development: A Case Study
Photo: A Ministry of Health participant receives a certificate of completion for
the Power BI workshop, alongside the UCSF team and the Head of Surveillance.