ASIARS-Net (ASIan Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network) is an international web-database system for AMR surveillance developed in WHO Collaborating Centre for AMR surveillance of research at National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan. To support development of AMR surveillance in the world, especially countries in the Asia-Pacific region, WHO Collaborating Centre for AMR surveillance of research in Japan has been developing it (details are written in our open-access review in 2020 and another open-access review in AMR control in 2019) based on the JANIS system, but is open-source and available confidentially (i.e., each country can use it on its own database without anyone else outside the country knowing it) at almost no cost. The development is based on the Government of Japan’s National Action Plan on AMR, 2016-2020 puts international collaboration (particularly among Asian countries) as one of its priority objectives. Such a system is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia (SEA), where there is good interest in AMR-related issues and an obvious need for national surveillance data that can help in decision-making and evidence-based policy formulation, particularly given the resource-constrained settings of the region and the availability of the system at almost no cost.

The ASIARS-Net system was built as a secure cloud system outside Japan in which each country can own a confidential database, upload and automatically process a large amount of data, and create both a national report and a facility-specific feedback report using an improved user interface requiring only a few workers at each country to operate the surveillance system.

 

 

Figure. ASIARS-Net, an international system for national AMR surveillance

Each country can own a confidential web-database, upload and process a large amount of data, and create both national reports and one that can be provided to WHO GLASS. Clinical laboratories in each country can prepare input data using either WHONET or Excel.

 

Any country wishing to utilize it can enjoy the benefit of the original JANIS system, such as automated data processing (from data check to report creation) and direct inter-hospital comparison, as well as benchmarking using the boxplot figures.

The development of the ASIARS-Net system is ongoing, and it operates in close collaboration with the WHO Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance, which is responsible for the development, dissemination, and support of the free Windows-based WHONET software. This stand-alone software is the most widely used lab information management software that supports surveillance activities in over 2000 laboratories across more than 120 countries, including those that have limited resources. It is usually installed at hospital laboratories so that automated data analysis and reporting can be easily be done by the facility staff. In contrast, ASIARS-Net is a centrally managed web-database system that does not have a manual data entry function yet, but is designed to aggregate data automatically and enable data comparison among any participating hospitals, irrespective of the number. Through active discussions between the ASIARS-Net team and WHONET developers, a WHONET function was developed to export its data to a ASIARS-Net format, which can be directly uploaded to the ASIARS-Net system.

Furthermore, we have developed a simple companion tool that can convert an Excel-format data file for the ASIARS-Net system, which is convenient for clinical laboratories that do not use WHONET (the tool is available at https://github.com/bioprojects/Excel_to_ASIARS-Net). We have also developed a function to import a single file containing the full data of a hospital, or even combined files from multiple hospitals, enabling more flexible data import compared to the monthly import function in the original JANIS system. We have further developed various new functions in the ASIARS-Net system, such as that for an administrator in a country to create a report to the WHO GLASS by a simple web click. Such improvements are based on collaboration with and feedback from countries that utilize it, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Mongolia.

 

The English manual for administrators in each country is available here

 

 

For those who are interested in the ASIARS-Net system, please get in touch with