Author: admin

We have just published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics a new research paper entitled, “Quality of routine health data collected by health workers using smartphones at primary health care in Ethiopia.”. This article gives a comprehensive account of Health Extension Workers’s experiences using mobile health data collection tools. Here is the abstract:

Mobile phone based applications are considered by many as potentially useful for addressing challenges and improving the quality of data collection in developing countries. Yet very little evidence is available supporting or refuting the potential and widely perceived benefits on the use of electronic forms on smartphones for routine patient data collection by health workers at primary health care facilities.

Methods:
A facility based cross sectional study using a structured paper checklist was prepared to assess the completeness and accuracy of 408 electronic records completed and submitted to a central database server using electronic forms on smartphones by 25 health workers. The 408 electronic records were selected randomly out of a total of 1772 maternal health records submitted by the health workers to the central database over a period of six months. Descriptive frequencies and percentages of data completeness and error rates were calculated.

Results:
When compared to paper records, the use of electronic forms significantly improved data completeness by 209 (8%) entries. Of a total 2622 entries checked for completeness, 2602 (99.2%) electronic record entries were complete, while 2393 (91.3%) paper record entries were complete. A very small percentage of error rates, which was easily identifiable, occurred in both electronic and paper forms although the error rate in the electronic records was more than double that of paper records (2.8% vs. 1.1%). More than half of entry errors in the electronic records related to entering a text value.

Conclusions:
With minimal training, supervision, and no incentives, health care workers were able to use electronic forms for patient assessment and routine data collection appropriately and accurately with a very small error rate. Minimising the number of questions requiring text responses in electronic forms would be helpful in minimizing data errors.

Over the last few months, Digital Campus has been working with Instrat Global Health Solutions, Medical Aid Films and mPowering Frontline Health Workers to develop a video training program for frontline health workers in Ondo State, Nigeria.

The project launch event took place on 22 April 2016 attended by Honorable Commissioner of Health Ondo State Dr Dayo Adeyanju, the Permanent Secretary of the Ondo State Ministry of Health, the Executive Secretary and Directors Ondo State Primary Health Care Board and representatives of the 18 PHC facilities who will be taking the training.

The training package consists of a series of the Medical Aid Films videos that have been translated into the local language, Yoruba, with a set of quizzes to test the users understanding of the videos. The package is all being run through OppiaMobile running on tablets held at the primary health care facilities. Digital Campus’s role in this program was mainly providing training to the local Instrat team for the content development and adaptation. We’re now extending this training to cover more of the technical aspects of supporting an OppiaMobile implementation.

Congratulations to our colleague, Selamawit Mengesha Bilal, who has just completed her PhD thesis entitled “The father’s role in child nutrition in Ethiopia”, as a scholar of the joint PhD program between Maastricht and Alcalá Universities. Digital Campus has been collaborating with Selam for the past years, so we’re really pleased she’s now completed her doctorate studies and we look forward to continue to working and collaborating with her once she’s back in her full time role in the College of Health Sciences at Mekelle University (Ethiopia), where she will be the first female professor with a PhD degree.

We’ve recently released a glossary of health terms in both English and Tigrinyan, available as a Moodle course (at: http://moodle.digital-campus.org/course/view.php?id=265) and as a package that can be run offline in the OppiaMobile app.

All the terms defined are taken directly from the Ethiopian Health Extension Worker Level 4 upgrade training programme. Every section of all 13 modules has a series of terms (shown in bold in the training manuals) that the health workers are expected to understand, so we have extracted these and then supplied definitions in both English and Tigrinyan. In total, there are over 650 terms defined.

Many thanks to the Jhpiego Ethiopia team and the tutors and students of the Dr Tewolde Health Training College in Mekelle, Ethiopia for creating the translations.

Any feedback on how these definitions and translations could be improved is much appreciated.