Strengthening health system resilience & emergency management in Syria

An AI-powered public health platform and tech-enabled emergency management system to improve pandemic morbidity and mortality in Syria.

Hala’s solution Team Leaders are:

1. John Jaeger, Co-Founder & CEO

2. Dave Levin, Co-Founder & COO

In Syria, nine years of civil war have devastated the healthcare system. Nearly 600 attacks on health facilities have killed over 900 medical personnel, and approximately 70% of healthcare workers have been forced to flee. The impacts of COVID-19 (C19) exacerbate an already crippled public health system. The WHO-sanctioned organization responsible for C19 surveillance in northwest Syria (NWS), EWARN, predicted at the onset of the pandemic that 40-70% of the civilian population could be impacted. 

Hala’s leadership team has administered programs in Syria since 2012. In 2016, Hala launched an early warning system against airstrikes that reaches up to 2.3 million civilians. Through consultations with our partners, Hala has identified critical obstacles that cripple NWS’ pandemic response: ineffective data collection technology; lack of warning and response coordination across the disease surveillance system; and lack of an integrated system for data collection, analysis, and visualization. Hala in consortium with local and global partners including the University of Cambridge and King’s College London seeks to deploy an AI-powered public health platform that digitizes the entire data value chain and increases capacity for AI-enabled diagnostics; and an in-field emergency management system.

Hala seeks to support health systems’ strengthening for pandemic preparedness and response in NWS, delivering impact at an institutional level and among first responders, civilians, and vulnerable populations (e.g., IDPs). Hala has conducted dozens of consultations with our partners in Syria that have uncovered challenges directly addressed by Hala’s solution spanning ineffective data collection technology; lack of effective warning and response coordination across the disease surveillance system; and lack of an integrated system for data collection, analysis, and visualization. Institutional bodies such as EWARN, a network of health partners conducting disease surveillance in humanitarian contexts in collaboration with the WHO are a core target audience which has been engaged in the conceptualization and co-creation of the proposed solution. First responder groups across NWS have informed the development of Sentry Respond, an emergency response coordination tool that enables two-way communication between civilians and first responders. Requirements have been gathered from all major stakeholder groups, including but not limited to women, men, IDPs, doctors, and civil defense. Hala will build on our ongoing trusted engagement in Syria across our target impact groups to continue to refine, pilot, and iterate on our proposed solution.

Hala’s approach to technology is to enhance locally-designed and -managed solutions, equipping partners with reliable information and open source tools, and strengthening partners’ capacity to operate and administer tech solutions with minimal long-term requirements. Public goods envisioned to be delivered  include: providing research and innovation support to the major medical organizations in NWS on free and open-source tools to support C19 and potential future pandemics’ response; building the technical capacity of healthcare partners by providing training on advanced analytics and technology; and deploying a public emergency response service for the community and a coordination tool for first responders through Hala’s Sentry Respond. Hala’s team brings a wealth of experience providing capacity building and training on topics including software engineering, task automation, debugging issues, and communication. The training provided under this proposed solution will be co-created with our partners, ensuring that they are designed in a manner to best meet their needs. The public emergency response service will be available to populations across NWS, expected to reach 70% of adults with access to a smartphone. Hala continuously evaluates access to hand-held communication devices across demographic cross sections including women and girls and displaced persons to ensure equitable access to solution’s services.

Intended impact is reducing pandemic-related morbidity and mortality in northwest Syria by strengthening health systems; improving management systems for pandemic preparedness; and reducing disruption of economic activity during the pandemic. Outputs and supporting activities include: 

1. Reliable, real-time information enabling the healthcare system to prioritize the deployment of resources and reduce mortality in the event of an outbreak. Key activities include:  

a. Digitize EWARN’s data collection for case-based C19 surveillance, enabling real-time and daily reporting 

b. Increase capacity for diagnostics through AI-driven analysis of symptoms data

c. Strengthen EWARN’s pandemic early warning system: rapidly identify and predict infection hotspots and send alerts across the healthcare system

d. Create a single, integrated system for data collection, analysis, visualization, and dissemination for EWARN. 

e. Strengthen the capacity of healthcare providers by training on advanced analytics and related technologies 


2. Strengthened community resilience enabled by improved emergency response service for the community and coordination system for first responders: Hala has prototyped Sentry Respond. User requirements have been completed. The concept has been validated, and the remaining activities include conducting a community-wide awareness campaign, testing the solution in the field, performing security analysis, iteratively improving the product, and maintaining it over time.

Hala has provided life-saving information since 2016 in Syria when we launched an early warning system, Sentry, which detects conflict-related data using human- and machine-collected field observations, providing an average of 7-10 minutes of warning, and protecting 2.3 million people. Hala will build on this impact employing a phased approach. First, Hala will seek to rapidly scale and replicate in other geographies, first in Arabic-speaking countries. Hala’s solution is designed to be applicable to non Covid-19 public health challenges. Through engagement with local partners in Syria and Yemen, Hala is aware of the challenges that health information systems face with data collection, some of which can be mitigated through the proposed application of tools that automate data entry and mine unstructured text for relevant information. Hala will also seek to apply advanced analytics to other public health problems in new geographies (e.g., cholera in Yemen), with a view toward strengthening community resilience. The current pandemic clearly illuminates the necessity of investing now to reduce vulnerability and to enhance preparedness for future emergencies.

The primary metrics Hala aims to employ to track the performance of our proposed solution include:

1. Metrics on the impact on the population - These metrics include mortality reduction, disease transmission rate reduction, and improved psychological well-being. Hala has a long history of tracking our Sentry Syria system’s impact on the civilian population through similar indicators including what impact the system has on casualties due to airstrikes and the overall wellbeing of the civilian population. 

2. Metrics on the use of our proposed solution’s data and reporting - These metrics examine how stakeholders are making use of the data and reporting gathered and curated through the AI-powered health system platform. Proposed indicators include: data intake rate, reporting rate, increased diagnostic capacity

3. Health platform and emergency response system development and performance - These metrics gauge the performance of the proposed solution as a cohesive set of systems working together for a common purpose. These include: disease early warning system reach, disease early warnings issued, and count of communities leveraging emergency response services.

Hala has significantly invested in its technology infrastructure in order to make the architecture easily scalable and transferrable. Hala invests in software simulation which allows the design of products as close to the real specs as possible without expensive modification and development. Ongoing investments in ‘core’ and ‘modular’ product components that scale across geographies and humanitarian contexts (based on common user feedback from Yemen and Syria over the last five years of service delivery) will be key opportunities in our scaling journey over the next three years, alongside investments in company structures that support scaling. In the immediate future, over the next year, securing pilot funding to test and iterate on our proposed solution in our current country of operation in Syria will be critical to unlock key learnings and system improvements toward unlocking larger-scale impact funding to support ongoing product development for growth and positioning in the emergency management and incident response market.

Hala’s consortium comprises the Syria Public Health Network, and academic partners Dr. Adam Coutts, Dr Saleyha Ahsan, University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology and Dr Abdulkarim Ekzayez and Professor Richard Sullivan, King’s College London. 

Lead health advisors are Sir Stephen O’Brien, KBE and Hamish de Bretton Gordon OBE.

Beyond financial assistance, Hala can benefit from The Trinity Challenge, as follows: 1. Exposure — MIT Solve’s community of 500+ cross-sector leaders and its media connections at leading publications can be immensely helpful to Hala for funding and partnership opportunities. Hala has learned that one effective strategy for entering new countries is to pursue partnerships with traditional implementing partners that are often awarded large contracts by our target donors; 2. Technical Assistance: Hala’s breadth of technology is one of its greatest strengths, but we want to amplify those strengths through access to the world’s leading technology and health institutions. Furthering our understanding of best practices of technology, innovation, and commercialization are critical to Hala’s long-term sustainability and maximization of impact; 3. Monitoring & Evaluation: M&E for technology-focused health and emergency services’ solutions in conflict zones face many challenges. Being able to accurately measure impact is absolutely critical. With support from MIT Solve, we hope to further develop high-quality, results-based research that we can then  promote globally. We believe this will foster the use of technology solutions that can help improve civilian protection and health outcomes in conflict; and bring greater engagement with influential stakeholders, advocates and  policy makers.

Hala welcomes partnership support across all of the following areas: access to new markets; funding; talent recruitment; mentorship and/or coaching; board members or advisors; monitoring and evaluation; and marketing, media, and exposure. 

We have segmented potential partnerships, as below:

Complementary and Horizontal Partners: Complementary partnerships offer a way for Hala to enter new markets and leverage its potential with partner capabilities and networks. 

• Facebook

• Google

• Global Virome Project

• GSK


• Bay Area Global Health Alliance

• BD Global Health

• Bluedot

Fundraising - funding from organizations and foundations that share Hala’s values and are in a position to support innovative health and emergency services’ initiatives via R&D and technical assistance funding, or provide capacity building for our local partners. 

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• Clinton Health Access Initiative

• Patrick J. MacGovern Foundation