Health information goes mobile
In
Africa the mobile phone is revolutionising banking. And one expert
predicts that it will soon have a central role in the healthcare of
millions of poor people.
Health services in developing countries often lack reliable data to help them fight killer diseases. The reason, which people in the computer-driven developed world find hard to believe, is that health researchers in these countries still use a centuries-old method that is both time-consuming and error-prone – pen and paper.
Dr Joel Selanikio, an American physician and public health software consultant, knows the problem first hand. “The tremendous inefficiency of this process,” he says, “means that public health programmes are starving for the kind of data that allows for more efficient programmes, more accurate planning, and in the end a healthier population.”
With this in mind, Dr Selanikio and technologist Rose Donna, set up a software consultancy, DataDyne.org. Now they are working with international bodies like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to help others collect and share information to improve healthcare.
The WHO recently adopted Datadyne’s Episurveyor software as the standard for mobile data collection in
sub-Saharan Africa. The programme is free and ‘open source’. It’s also simple to use, and will run on
palmtops
and smartphones. Health services in some countries are paying foreign
consultants tens of thousands of dollars to set up surveys to get the
data they need. They no longer need to, says Dr Selanikio. The
EpiSurveyor toolkit allows users to produce a data entry form on a
handheld device, collect data, and transfer it to a laptop for
analysis. After a couple of hours’ training, a health worker can put
the programme to a range of uses including household surveys, clinical
surveillance, outbreak investigations and medical record keeping.
In Tanzania, the Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre used handheld computers for a survey into malaria treatments that won international acclaim. The centre’s director Dr Hassan Mshinda says the devices enable his team to do more research every year and go deeper into rural areas with less cost.
Despite their effectiveness many palmtops lack the wireless connectivity of new generation mobile phones. Recently The Vodaphone Group Foundation and the United Nations Foundation funded a trial survey using mobile technology in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Zambia. The pilot “dramatically increased” the amount of public health information available in the three countries and prompted the WHO to adopt EpiSurveyor as the standard for Africa.
Dr Selanikio believes mobiles that connect with the internet – low-cost equivalents of the iPhone, perhaps – will supersede unconnected palmtops as the researcher’s hardware of choice. And, yes, he’s talking about health services in developing countries.
“It’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed.”
Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for mobiles – though most people still don’t have one of their own. However, the groups of people more likely to own a mobile include teachers and healthcare professionals.
In many developing countries, health workers get trained only once – at the outset of their careers. Because transport is such a problem in poor areas, keeping clinic workers’ medical knowledge up to date is difficult if not impossible. Travelling to attend a health conference, for instance, is out of the question while sending learning materials by mail is costly and unreliable. But Dr Selanikio foresees the day when managers will send education messages to the mobile phones of health workers in remote places. This will transform not only the health professional’s own level of knowledge but also the quality of care.
MORE INFORMATION
www.datadyne.org
www.unfoundation.org/vodaphone
Health services in developing countries often lack reliable data to help them fight killer diseases. The reason, which people in the computer-driven developed world find hard to believe, is that health researchers in these countries still use a centuries-old method that is both time-consuming and error-prone – pen and paper.
Dr Joel Selanikio, an American physician and public health software consultant, knows the problem first hand. “The tremendous inefficiency of this process,” he says, “means that public health programmes are starving for the kind of data that allows for more efficient programmes, more accurate planning, and in the end a healthier population.”
With this in mind, Dr Selanikio and technologist Rose Donna, set up a software consultancy, DataDyne.org. Now they are working with international bodies like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to help others collect and share information to improve healthcare.
The WHO recently adopted Datadyne’s Episurveyor software as the standard for mobile data collection in
sub-Saharan Africa. The programme is free and ‘open source’. It’s also simple to use, and will run on
In Tanzania, the Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre used handheld computers for a survey into malaria treatments that won international acclaim. The centre’s director Dr Hassan Mshinda says the devices enable his team to do more research every year and go deeper into rural areas with less cost.
Despite their effectiveness many palmtops lack the wireless connectivity of new generation mobile phones. Recently The Vodaphone Group Foundation and the United Nations Foundation funded a trial survey using mobile technology in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Zambia. The pilot “dramatically increased” the amount of public health information available in the three countries and prompted the WHO to adopt EpiSurveyor as the standard for Africa.
Dr Selanikio believes mobiles that connect with the internet – low-cost equivalents of the iPhone, perhaps – will supersede unconnected palmtops as the researcher’s hardware of choice. And, yes, he’s talking about health services in developing countries.
“It’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed.”
Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for mobiles – though most people still don’t have one of their own. However, the groups of people more likely to own a mobile include teachers and healthcare professionals.
In many developing countries, health workers get trained only once – at the outset of their careers. Because transport is such a problem in poor areas, keeping clinic workers’ medical knowledge up to date is difficult if not impossible. Travelling to attend a health conference, for instance, is out of the question while sending learning materials by mail is costly and unreliable. But Dr Selanikio foresees the day when managers will send education messages to the mobile phones of health workers in remote places. This will transform not only the health professional’s own level of knowledge but also the quality of care.
MORE INFORMATION
www.datadyne.org
www.unfoundation.org/vodaphone