The main responsibilities of the epidemiological surveillance unit are to:

• Keep track of communicable diseases,
• Conduct epidemiological investigation and national studies, 
• Prepare the feed back to health professionals, 
• Train them to use the surveillance tools,
• Establish a national epidemiological information system.

The surveillance system relies on the collaboration of the hospitals (over 150), health centers (over 600), dispensaries, laboratories (over 350), and private clinics. It also involves coordination with different health services related to different ministries. The critical responsibilities of the unit make the time factor crucial to locate any communicable diseases on Lebanese territories and take immediate actions accordingly.

Thus, the main objective of this project is to facilitate the reporting and communication between all concerned medical parties acting in Lebanon by providing a capable information system and required hardware equipment. Further to several meetings with the unit representatives and extensive market research, it was decided that the EPIinfo software, provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), was the most effective application for this purpose and hence it will be used for this project.