Provision of a Mobile and Offline Client for Emergency Management System

Item Description:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is a public international organization, consisting of 194 Member States, and a Specialized Agency of the United Nations with the mandate to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. As such, WHO is dependent on the budgetary and extra-budgetary contributions it receives for the implementation of its activities. Bidders are, therefore, requested to propose the best and most cost-effective solution to meet WHO requirements, while ensuring a high level of service.

The WHO invites vendors to submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) for a mobile and offline technology capability for its Emergency Management System.

The mission of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme (WHE) is to help countries, and to coordinate international action, to prevent, prepare for, detect, rapidly respond to, and recover from outbreaks and emergencies. The programme is supported by a collection of digital solutions that are being integrated for more efficient collaboration. As part of that exercise, the need for a mobile and offline client have been identified for one of the core components of this ecosystem of Emergency Management Software (EMS).

WHO has been improving one aspect of its EMS by developing a custom application on top of Juvare’s WebEOC. The scope of this document is not related to any changes to the EMS but rather the addition of mobile, offline capability.

The EMS has several technical characteristics that should be noted: it’s a .Net Web Application that uses third party web components like Bootstrap and Dhmltx on the front-end and provides a standalone client in the form of a Single Page Application as well as a set of REST APIs to support back-end functions.

Juvare’s WebEOC enables the creation and modification of features using configurations (called boards). A board provides a flexible way to add a specific (e.g. people deployment in an Emergency) or generic (e.g. list of people) feature to the system. A board is an addition to the system data structure that uses both existing and new data fields to compose a new data set. A user can enter data through an input view which is a s HTML form and see data in a display view which is also based on HTML. One should note that WHO’s WebEOC boards use a REST API developed by WHO to get and post data, not the XSL that is native to WebEOC.

The client will address the following objectives:

1. Deliver a mobile client for WHO Emergency Management software.
2. The mobile client, when online, must support the standard usage of the EMS (but not administrative usage such as board configuration). The client must support good usage in low or intermittent bandwidth environment where the Heath Emergency can occur.
3. Since the creation of modification of boards happens through configuration (no server-side code change), It is expected that these new features will be available to the mobile user also without publishing a new version of the client.
4. The mobile client must support some usage of the application when completely offline, with a resynchronisation mechanism when the device recovers connectivity. The client must be able to store structured data and file attachments offline. An offline-first architecture is currently recommended.
5. To Manage local storage, the mobile client should allow the user to pick a selection of what to be used and stored offline (e.g. select specific emergencies for offline access).
6. The mobile client should support forUniversal Windows Platform and the latest versions of Apple iOS, Android and Mac OS
7. The mobile client should be designed to be extensible for further development and usage on other application and APIs in the future.

WHO intends to invite selected vendors to participate in a formal solicitation, via a Request for Proposals (RFP), at a later stage, for the above requirements. Complete details of the requirements will be included in the solicitation documents.

EOI_Mobile and Offline Client for Emergency Management System_056_20190419.docx