Sentinel is an open-source, web-based platform designed for routine disease surveillance, outbreak management and contact tracing. It combines a structured data model for patients, cases, contacts and outbreaks with configurable metadata that determines what information is collected, how it is evaluated and where it enters the operational workflow.
This hybrid approach is intended to help public health teams respond when surveillance requirements change. Within Sentinel’s supported configuration model, authorised staff can adjust data capture, questionnaires, case definitions, task instructions and reporting without rebuilding the application for each outbreak.
Designed for an unknown disease
A guiding principle is that Sentinel should be able to accommodate “Disease X”: a new or changing threat whose investigation requirements cannot be fully specified in advance.
Traditional developer-led products can require a new technical change cycle when teams need an additional field, a revised interview question or a different calculation. During an outbreak, that cycle can draw scarce epidemiological expertise away from the response and into writing specifications, reviewing builds and coordinating releases.
Reduce operational change during an outbreak
Every digital system requires training. The operational challenge is to avoid retraining a rapidly expanding workforce each time the surveillance process changes.
Sentinel represents repeatable public health work as tasks and surveys. These can support activities such as contact-tracing interviews, health advice, isolation advice and data-quality follow-up. Public health staff with appropriate permissions can update the task instructions, digital scripts and supported calculations used by those workflows.
For a newly onboarded contact tracer, the working interface can remain deliberately focused: receive the next assigned task or survey, follow the current questions and instructions, and record the outcome. When the central configuration changes, subsequent work uses the revised workflow without requiring every operator to interpret the underlying technical change.
Operational functions that support scaling include:
- Task templates for standardised interviews, follow-up and public health actions.
- Versioned questionnaires with conditional questions, validation and supported calculations.
- Queues that present assigned work to interviewers and contact tracers.
- Supervisor views for allocation, call attempts and team progress.
- Central updates to instructions and data-collection requirements.
Change data collection without rebuilding
Outbreak requirements can change quickly. A team may need to record attendance at a particular exposure site, add a new risk factor or alter the information collected during an interview. In a conventional system, even a small change can initiate a database, form, reporting and release cycle.
Sentinel moves many of these routine changes into configuration available through the application. Depending on the workflow, authorised public health staff and epidemiologists can configure:
- Custom fields for patient and investigation records.
- Conditional surveys and versioned interview scripts.
- Mappings from survey responses into structured records.
- Machine-readable case definitions and classification workflows.
- Disease-specific task templates, instructions and due-date rules.
- Reports, filters and collection queries for analysis.
These changes can be made without adding a dedicated database column for every new variable or changing the source code for every revised questionnaire.
What configuration does—and does not—replace
Configuration reduces dependence on developers for supported surveillance changes; it does not remove the need for governance, testing or operational leadership.
- Changed questions, mappings and calculations should be tested against representative scenarios before use.
- Teams still need appropriate onboarding, role guidance and supervision.
- Access controls determine who can change configuration and who can view affected records.
- New integrations, entity types or application behaviours may still require software development.
The objective is to keep epidemiological expertise focused on surveillance and response decisions, rather than requiring routine operational changes to be translated into a developer-led rebuild.