Alex Little – co-founder and director of Digital Campus will be participating in a panel discussion event organised by Feed the Minds around the question of ‘Does technology help or hinder low literacy communities engage in health projects?‘
For full details of the other panelists and to register to attend the event please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/literacy-technology-better-health-panel-discussion-event-tickets-38389051687
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.
Digital Campus, with support from mPowering Frontline Health Workers, is very pleased to announce the release of mobile adapted versions of the OpenWASH training programme.
Based closely on the training model used for HEAT for training Health Extensions Workers in Ethiopia, “OpenWASH is a set of innovative learning resources launched in 2016 by The Open University in partnership with World Vision Ethiopia and UNICEF through the ONEWASH PLUS programme, funded by UK aid from the UK Government. OpenWASH supports the Government of Ethiopia’s One WASH National Programme which aims to radically improve the provision of safe water and sanitation and bring significant benefits to millions of people.” (quote from the OpenWASH website).
The OpenWASH courses were released as Open Educational Resources (OER) under a Creative Commons license.
The adaptation involved taking the original print-focused course content and creating a version suitable for mobile delivery using the open source OppiaMobile learning platform, so the courses may be downloaded and used offline on Android devices.
Additional quiz questions for all the study sessions have been added, and non-country specific versions of the courses have also been created. The adaptation process we used has been documented here: http://oppiamobile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/author/adapt/openwash.html.
The adapted courses in Moodle can be found here: Ethiopia specific version or Globally adapted version and to view on your Android device, install the OppiaMobile app, then select the OpenWASH courses to be viewed offline.
Images of OpenWASH courses running offline on Android phone:
OppiaMobile is one of the example apps in an mHIFA poster “Assessing mobile healthcare information applications for citizens in low-resource settings” presented at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Low Resource Settings – AHT2016, Oxford, UK, 5-6 September.
Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs has just published a video on the Gyan Jyoti app used by ASHAs in India during their family planning counseling sessions. Gyan Jyoti is based on our OppiaMobile learning platform.
For more information see: http://ccp.jhu.edu/2015/06/29/one-good-app-deserves-another/ or download the Gyan Jyoti app on the Google Play store.
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.
We’ve just published an updated version of the OppiaMobile app on the Google Play store.
Most of the updates are minor bug fixes and performance improvements, though we have now added the option for user to progress through courses in a linear way – so only allowed to move on to the next activity after completing the previous. This can be set up for the course when it is exported from Moodle, and there is still the option to allow the user to complete activities in any order they feel.
For full details of the updates, please see the release notes.
On Tues eve, Alex gave a presentation at the ICT4D London Meetup Group – hosted in the GSMA office. The meetup was very well attended and got to hear about many other interesting initiatives and projects in mHealth.
Here’s the presentation I gave:
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.
