Many mobile projects struggle with scale and impact. While a mobile health project may run well with a small number of patients in one hospital, expanding the scope of a project until it is large enough to have real impact takes money, time, and widespread support of key stakeholders in a given community. ChildCount is well on its way to show scale and, so we hope, significant health impacts using mobile technology for patient support.
In a little over eight months, ChildCount has enrolled nearly 10,000 children under five in their catchment area into the ChildCount health monitoring system – an acceptance rate of more than 95%.
The pilot program launched in Sauri, Kenya, a Millennium Villages Project site. The project provides mobile phones to community health care workers who then use SMS to coordinate activities such as registering patients, transferring data to a central database, automatically alerting health workers to patients’ needs and facilitating communication among members of the health system. Roughly 100 community health workers at the Kenya site are equipped with mobile phones to monitor registered children for malnutrition and malaria.
The project’s five goals are to register every child under five in a given community into the ChildCount database, screen those children for signs of malnutrition every 90 days, monitor the children for the three major causes of death in children under five (malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia), group all children into age groups in order to streamline immunizations, and record all local child births and deaths. The program has been meeting these goals with considerable success; for example, when the program incorporated a measles immunization awareness program, over 8000 children were vaccinated within seven days.
Matt Berg, ICT coordinator of the Millennium Villages Project, says that the program provides benefits not only to the community’s children by helping keep them healthier, but also benefits community health workers by streamlining their work. According to Berg, “One of the reasons why it’s worked so well is that it’s very simple, and we really focused on providing a service immediately back to the community health workers.” As we have often noted, community health workers (lay health personnel) provide the majority of medical care in many developing countries.
ChildCount was specifically developed to be very easy to use and to provide regular updates on patients. Every month, each community health worker receives an update on the health of the children in his or her area, which helps them manage schedules and target at-risk children.
The program utilizes RapidSMS built on the Django (Python) platform. Berg says that Django is a development platform of choice for mobile projects, not only because it’s very structured, and thus easily adaptable, but also because Python is taught at many African universities. By designing the program in Python, local developers are able to continue work on the system in the future. RapidSMS, an open source mobile data collection platorm initially developed by UNICEF, is characterized by the simplicity of its forms and its adaptability; says Berg, “We built RapidSMS up into what we wanted it to be […] adapting, changing what we were doing on the fly – that’s a nice thing about RapidSMS, it let us change.”
Funding for the project came through partnerships with local telecommunications companies Ericsson and Zain, who facilitated a toll-free number so that communications between community health workers and their communities is free. Sony provided mobile phones for the workers, and ChildCount received $10,000 in seed money through a private grant, while UNICEF paid the programmers who developed ChildCount. The goal is to now make the project sustainable by continuing in partnerships with telecommunications companies and local governments.
According to Berg, the team had originally planned to target only malnourished and/or at-risk children in their area. However, once the team was on the ground, they realized that developing a comprehensive database of all the children in the area would better contribute to community health, and help prevent malnutrition and other diseases by ensuring that each child was accounted for by the local CHWs. Although it was a challenge to expand the program from the original concept to a much more comprehensive scope, Berg credited RapidSMS and its adaptability for making these scope changes relatively easy to implement.
Another challenge the group has faced was making the database actionable – that is, once the children are registered into the ChildCount system, how can community health workers use the data to improve the children’s health? Berg says that in the new version of the ChildCount software, called ChildCount+ and already rolled out in Uganda, there will be a greater focus on immunization drives and follow-ups for at-risk-children from CHWs.
One aspect of the project that worked especially well was the collaboration between the Millennium Villages Project team and the local community health workers. Says Berg, “The thing that really made it work is that we had the full support of the local health team, so we walked into an amazing group.”
ChildCount is expanding to more Millennium Villages in the next few months, and has already launched an updated version of the program in Uganda. In the new version, ChildCount+ now covers antenatal care, pregnancy care, post-pregnancy care and children up to age five. The project is slated to expand to 14 Millennium Villages sites in ten countries within the next few months, with the goal of registering 100,000 children with ChildCount+.
The goal of ChildCount and ChildCount+ is to encapsulate many of the best practices of health care management into one process. Says Berg, “It proves that it’s possible to keep track of every kid – if you have a stable community, it’s possible to systematically approach it. I think we’re onto some cool ideas that will stick and provide value.”
ChildCount: Monitoring Children's Health Through SMS Locations
Many mobile projects struggle with scale and impact. While a mobile health project may run well with a small number of patients in one hospital, expanding the scope of a project until it is large enough to have real impact takes money, time, and widespread support of key stakeholders in a given community. ChildCount is well on its way to show scale and, so we hope, significant health impacts using mobile technology for patient support.
In a little over eight months, ChildCount has enrolled nearly 10,000 children under five in their catchment area into the ChildCount health monitoring system – an acceptance rate of more than 95%.
The pilot program launched in Sauri, Kenya, a Millennium Villages Project site. The project provides mobile phones to community health care workers who then use SMS to coordinate activities such as registering patients, transferring data to a central database, automatically alerting health workers to patients’ needs and facilitating communication among members of the health system. Roughly 100 community health workers at the Kenya site are equipped with mobile phones to monitor registered children for malnutrition and malaria.
The project’s five goals are to register every child under five in a given community into the ChildCount database, screen those children for signs of malnutrition every 90 days, monitor the children for the three major causes of death in children under five (malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia), group all children into age groups in order to streamline immunizations, and record all local child births and deaths. The program has been meeting these goals with considerable success; for example, when the program incorporated a measles immunization awareness program, over 8000 children were vaccinated within seven days.
Matt Berg, ICT coordinator of the Millennium Villages Project, says that the program provides benefits not only to the community’s children by helping keep them healthier, but also benefits community health workers by streamlining their work. According to Berg, “One of the reasons why it’s worked so well is that it’s very simple, and we really focused on providing a service immediately back to the community health workers.” As we have often noted, community health workers (lay health personnel) provide the majority of medical care in many developing countries.
ChildCount was specifically developed to be very easy to use and to provide regular updates on patients. Every month, each community health worker receives an update on the health of the children in his or her area, which helps them manage schedules and target at-risk children.
The program utilizes RapidSMS built on the Django (Python) platform. Berg says that Django is a development platform of choice for mobile projects, not only because it’s very structured, and thus easily adaptable, but also because Python is taught at many African universities. By designing the program in Python, local developers are able to continue work on the system in the future. RapidSMS, an open source mobile data collection platorm initially developed by UNICEF, is characterized by the simplicity of its forms and its adaptability; says Berg, “We built RapidSMS up into what we wanted it to be […] adapting, changing what we were doing on the fly – that’s a nice thing about RapidSMS, it let us change.”
Funding for the project came through partnerships with local telecommunications companies Ericsson and Zain, who facilitated a toll-free number so that communications between community health workers and their communities is free. Sony provided mobile phones for the workers, and ChildCount received $10,000 in seed money through a private grant, while UNICEF paid the programmers who developed ChildCount. The goal is to now make the project sustainable by continuing in partnerships with telecommunications companies and local governments.
According to Berg, the team had originally planned to target only malnourished and/or at-risk children in their area. However, once the team was on the ground, they realized that developing a comprehensive database of all the children in the area would better contribute to community health, and help prevent malnutrition and other diseases by ensuring that each child was accounted for by the local CHWs. Although it was a challenge to expand the program from the original concept to a much more comprehensive scope, Berg credited RapidSMS and its adaptability for making these scope changes relatively easy to implement.
Another challenge the group has faced was making the database actionable – that is, once the children are registered into the ChildCount system, how can community health workers use the data to improve the children’s health? Berg says that in the new version of the ChildCount software, called ChildCount+ and already rolled out in Uganda, there will be a greater focus on immunization drives and follow-ups for at-risk-children from CHWs.
One aspect of the project that worked especially well was the collaboration between the Millennium Villages Project team and the local community health workers. Says Berg, “The thing that really made it work is that we had the full support of the local health team, so we walked into an amazing group.”
ChildCount is expanding to more Millennium Villages in the next few months, and has already launched an updated version of the program in Uganda. In the new version, ChildCount+ now covers antenatal care, pregnancy care, post-pregnancy care and children up to age five. The project is slated to expand to 14 Millennium Villages sites in ten countries within the next few months, with the goal of registering 100,000 children with ChildCount+.
The goal of ChildCount and ChildCount+ is to encapsulate many of the best practices of health care management into one process. Says Berg, “It proves that it’s possible to keep track of every kid – if you have a stable community, it’s possible to systematically approach it. I think we’re onto some cool ideas that will stick and provide value.”
i loved the idea of an sms
i loved the idea of an sms based alert sytem. i m very keen in makin a project on this topic for 3rd year diploma engineering. i would be thankful if u could give me details like what tools are required? what languages do i have to learn? and how do i go about the project?
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