Admin User Manual

The first Login/registration

Once the SORMAS has been installed on the server and is functional, then IT administrators within your organization will receive the administrator credential. These administrator credentials allow you to create further users in SORMAS.

Login and Logout

As soon as you have received your username and initial password from your IT team, you can log in to SORMAS for the first time with your account data (username, password). Your IT team must provide you with the URL(Link) to the SORMAS as well. If you don’t receive the URL(link), Please contact your IT Team. Once you have clicked on the link, You will land on the login page of SORMAS which will look like the image below:

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Here you have to write your username and password sent by your IT team. Please keep in mind that the username and password both are case-sensitive. Once you have entered your password correctly you will land on the dashboard of SORMAS.

If you are receiving an error message in the login process which looks like the image below. It shows that you have entered the wrong username and password. If the error message exists despite of multiple attempts, please contact with your IT team.

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Once you have successfully logged into SORMAS, you will land on the dashboard view.

Once you have logged in and finished your job in the SORMAS system, you can logout from the system safely. To log out safely, the blue ribbon is located on the left-hand side. In the left blue ribbon, there is a button “Logout” at the end, you will see the user name with which you are logged in Clicking this button immediately logs you out of the program.

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User Management (Roles and Rights)

The following standard user roles are available in SORMAS. Various combinations can be used. Standard user roles can be combined in such a way that they complement each other. Roles must have the same hierarchy level and therefore correspond to the same area of responsibility restriction. For this reason, management and authorized representative roles, for example, cannot be combined.

A detailed description of the available standard user roles and the associated rights is listed below. These descriptions are intended to provide SORMAS users with a better overview and reflect the workflows applied in the office.

Admin

You create and manage other users and configurations of the system. Administrators can also view and edit all cases and contacts. However, their authorization to view personal data is limited without further user roles. They can also make deletions and perform imports.

Admin Surveillance Supervisor

This combined role combines some user rights of both roles, but other rights are excluded accordingly. The combined role may view and edit cases and contacts that are located in the assigned federal state. The combined role may save filter configurations for the user-defined export and use the mass processing mode for samples for cases. The combined role is NOT allowed to edit lab messages, create users, or perform imports and follow-ups.

National User

The user who sees all surveillance data (cases, contacts, samples, events, etc.) in the system and can make changes to it. This means that this role has no regional restrictions to their own health authority and that surveillance data from all districts/cities that have been created in their own health authority are also visible to people with this role. However, this user role has no adminis-trative or medical authorizations.

Surveillance Supervisor

The surveillance manager has the right to manage and edit all surveillance data for cases in a region. The surveillance manager only has limited rights to manage contacts.

Surveillance Officer

The Surveillance officer has the right to manage and process all monitoring data of cases in a district or a region. Monitoring officers have limited rights to manage contacts. If the monitoring officer is assigned a facility, his/her rights are further limited to this facility.

Hospital Informant/ Community

Informants can create and process cases and samples as well as view and process tasks. They are bound to their institution or municipality in terms of their authorization. These user roles can use both the SORMAS app and the web version

Community Officer

The Community Officer has extended rights to the hospital/community informant. Community officers may additionally change the location of cases, change the case investigation status, per-form case classification, create and edit pathogen tests, create, view, assign, edit, delete, classi-fy contacts, convert to a case, assign index case, access the external symptom diary, create and edit follow-up calls, create and assign tasks, create and edit actions, create and edit events, cre-ate, edit and import event participants and issue quarantine notices. In addition, municipal rep-resentatives can view all tasks in the respective municipality and assign tasks to employees at the next higher level of responsibility and have access to the statistics section.

Clinician

Clinician can document data on treatments, clinical course, therapy and previous illnesses for cases. With this role, additional tabs (therapy and clinical course) are available in the case file. This role can, for example, be assigned to medical This role can be assigned to specialist staff in a treatment center if SORMAS is used for the clinical management of cases. Otherwise, this role can be linked to other roles to extend user roles/rights. It is limited to one region at a time.

Case Officer

Case officers can create and process cases, samples, test results, treatments and therapies. They are not authorized to handle contacts. Their authorizations are linked to districts/cities.

Contact Supervisor (CS)

Contact supervisors have the right to manage and process all contact details of cases in a dis-trict/city. The contact officer only has limited rights to handle cases. If an institution is assigned to the contact officer, his/her rights are further limited to this institution.

Contact Officer (CO)

The contact line has the right to manage and edit all contact details of cases in an assigned re-gion. The contact line only has limited rights for handling cases.

Event Officer

Event officers can create and edit events and their actions. They can also create and edit event participants, cases, and samples. They can only view contacts, but not edit them. Their rights are limited to an assigned region.

Lab Officer

Laboratory officers manage samples, test results and additional tests in the system. They can also create and process cases. They have no location-specific restrictions, but are tied to specific laboratories. They are not authorized to view sensitive personal data.

External Lab Officer

External laboratory officers can only view and process samples, test results, additional tests and tasks. External laboratories are usually laboratories abroad and therefore the external labora-tory representatives are bound to external laboratories with their rights.

National Observer

National users can see all entities (cases, contacts, events, samples) in the system at national level, but have no editing rights. In addition, these users cannot see any sensitive personal data.

Region Observer

Region observers can see all entities (cases, contacts, events, samples) in the system at region level, but have no editing rights. In addition, users cannot see any sensitive personal data.

District Observer

The district observer can see all entities (cases, contacts, events, samples) in the system at the district/city level but has no editing rights. In addition, these users cannot see any sensitive per-sonal data.

National Clinician

National clinician have in principle the same rights as the user role doctor, but is not regionally restricted.

POE Informant/ POE Supervisor/ POE national user

Point-of-entry informant, point-of-entry Supervisor, and point-of-entry national user are similar to the informant, surveillance officer, and national user roles, but are restricted to points of entry. This role is mainly used at points of entry (airports, ports, etc.).

Creating a new user

The administrator can create new SORMAS users under the "Users" menu item. To do this, the "New user" button must be clicked. As shown in the image below:

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Once you have clicked on the “New User” button a form will be opened. When users are created in SORMAS by the administrator, the corresponding personal data of the user is stored (first and last name, e-mail address, and, if applicable, telephone number). It is recommended to store a language. As shown in the image below:

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The address of the facility should also be entered and the contact person of that facility as well if available. GPS coordinates should also be filled out if they were not added during the creation of the facility in the infrastructure data. Below is the image.

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You can adjust the user status in the User Data section. "Active" users can be assigned tasks, cases, etc otherwise you will not be able to perform any actions. The username is automatically generated from the first 4 letters of the first and last name (first letter capitalized) and can be changed afterward. You can also change the automatically generated username as well by entering the desired username but remember that manually entered username must be unique and should not exist in the system before. So, we recommend keeping the automatically generated username. On the right side of the form, you will see a list of user roles. You can choose the most suitable user role for your user. User roles have been described in the document already. Depending on your chosen user role, maybe you be asked to choose the region, district, and facility as well. Below is the image.

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You can also restrict the user to a specific disease as well. In some cases, you want the user to deal with and manage the specific disease. In that situation, you have to checkmark the “Restrict access to specific diseases” checkbox and then you will see the list of all available diseases in the SORMAS system. You can checkmark all the diseases that you want to be managed by this user. If you don’t Restrict access to specific diseases” then the user will have access to all diseases. Please note that all information marked with red “*” is mandatory to fill otherwise you will get an error message. Once all the necessary data has been entered, please click on "Save". You can have a look on the screenshot below for further reference.

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SORMAS automatically generates a password that is displayed ONCE and must be provided to the user by you.

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If the data of users is to be subsequently adjusted or changed, the following steps must be observed. Start editing existing users by clicking on the edit icon as shown in the image below.

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You can now change the user data and select "Create new password" at the bottom of the window. If an e-mail address has been entered, the user will be prompted by e-mail to create a new password. If no e-mail address is entered, SORMAS will automatically generate a password again. Note: this password is also only displayed ONCE.

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Custom User Roles

The custom user role function offers health departments the possibility to create and edit user roles with specific user rights and to export them.

Definition of User Roles

A user role includes a set of individual rights in SORMAS and the jurisdiction level (such as 'Region'). User roles are used to avoid having to define individual rights for each user: Instead of assigning the same individual rights directly to many users, a user role is defined that contains the rights to be assigned. The users are then assigned the appropriate role (or multiple roles). This simplifies the rights management in SORMAS, since only the rights of the user role need to be adjusted, especially when the rights structure changes.

Typically, user roles are defined for specific use cases. For this purpose, there is a set of default user roles provided by SORMAS. These can be used as templates for new user roles or can be customized by each health department itself.

Definition of User Rights

User rights ensure that the recorded data is protected against unauthorized access. User rights regulate which data individual users are allowed to read and edit. Most user rights define an action related to an entity type, e.g. the user right CASE_EDIT allows users to edit case data.

User rights are assigned in SORMAS by assigning a user role to a user.

Creating New User Roles

The creation of new user roles is complex and should therefore always be tested in practice before it is assigned to several employees/users.

Create a new user role and give it to selected employees for testing. If necessary, modify the role in consultation with the employees until the role covers everything that is intended, and then assign the tested user role to additional employees.

Below are some key points that must be considered when handling the user role creation process.

• The adjustment of a user role becomes active immediately after saving, i.e. all users with this role receive the changed rights.

• For all users active at this time, this means that the next time they interact with the system, these user rights will apply (e.g. open a new tab, select a menu item, save the current active view, etc.). For example, while a user is editing a case, the user's right to edit the case is revoked, then this user will receive an error message when saving the case since the necessary user right is checked when saving the case and the corresponding user right is no longer in possession at this time.

• Users whose role has been changed will not receive any notification from the system.

Some user rights are dependent on other user rights. This must be considered when creating new user roles. For example, the user right to "Edit existing cases" requires that the user right to "View existing cases" is also be assigned. Otherwise, the user rights and the associated function would not be usable.

When a user right is selected, all dependent user rights are automatically selected. In the above example, when the "Edit existing cases" user right is selected, the "View existing cases" user right is also automatically selected.

Please note that if a checkmark is removed from a user right, the user rights dependent on this user right cannot automatically be removed, since the dependent user right may still be dependent on another user right whose checkmark you do not want to remove. It is therefore recommended to assign the rights gradually and not to remove individual rights. Below is the table that describes what each user right means.