Up Close and Personal with TulaSalud's m-Health work in Guatemala data sheet 3010 Views
Mohini Bhavsar was a summer 2010 research intern at MobileActive.org. Shortly after, she volunteered with TulaSalud in Guatemala to observe what it takes to implement and scale a mobile health program.
Innovation in mobile health is not quite as widespread in Latin America as it is in Africa and Asia. Of the m-health programs in Latin America, little sharing of region-specific strategies has taken place.
TulaSalud is an organization based in Guatemala that is leveraging ICT -- specifically mobile phones -- to improve the delivery of health care services for indigenous communities. Through this case study, we hope to share some of what TulaSalud has learned over the years.
TulaSalud partners with the Ministry of Health and the Cobán School of Nursing and receives support from the Tula Foundation based in Canada. The organization's vision is to use ICT and mobile technology to reduce maternal and infant mortality and to monitor disease outbreaks in the remote highlands of Alta Verapaz. Using mobile phones, TulaSalud has been able to improve the flow of information between health professionals based in hospitals and community health workers (CHWs) in remote villages.
Alta Verapaz has the largest rural and poor indigenous population in the region with limited access to health care services. In an area with one million inhabitants, 93% are indigenous and share the highest burden of maternal mortality.
TulaSalud's community health workers, known as tele-facilitadores, use mobile phones to:
Zambia: Implementing The End Use Verification Survey Using Mobile Phone Technology data sheet 1992 Views
Author:
USAID
Publication Date:
Nov 2009
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
In November 2009, the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT office in Zambia, with technical assistance from the home office, conducted the End-Use Verification activity to assess the performance of the logistics management and supply chain systems for selected essential drugs, malaria and family planning commodities.
The survey was used in conjunction with the ongoing Essential Drugs Logistics System Pilot in Zambia, and overall objective was to assess how the logistics systems managed selected commodities at public health institutions, as well as provide a snapshot of how malaria was being diagnosed and treated at lower level facilities. This report presents the findings of the assessment as well as the short- and long-term recommendations to successfully implement the End-Use process, as well as the use of EpiSurveyor for regular data collection purposes.
Two of the fastest-growing and popular mobile data collection tools have recently seen some exciting upgrades in newly released versions.
Open Data Kit recently released v1.1 of ODK Collect. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. ODK Collect is powerful phone-based replacement for paper forms. Collect is built on the Android platform and can collect a variety of form data types: text, location, photos, video, audio, and barcodes. ODK Collect can be downloaded in the Android marketplace or here. The developers also have a demo video that describes the new features of the release. Open Data Kit is a member of the Open Mobile Consortium of which MobileAtive.org is a founding member.
Some of the new features of ODK Collect include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback, editing of saved forms, and device metadata (phone number, IMEI, IMSI) support. GPS acquisition and form processing is a faster, and the developers added review data entry. The user interface has been field tested and reworked to make training and use much easier. ODK Collect also supports question grouping, repeats, constraints, complex logic, and multiple languages.
ODK is currently deployed for HIV counseling with AMPATH in Kenya, user feedback gathering for Grameen's AppLab in Uganda, war crime documentation with the Berkeley Human Rights Center in the Central African Republic, and forest monitoring with the Brazilian Forest Service.
Meanwhile, our friends over at Datadyne have released version 2.0 of their popular mobile data collection platform EpiSurveyor. For some of the very cool GPS features of that, see the video below. EpiSurveyor is a free, user-friendly mobile-phone-and-web-based data collection system. Version 2.0 has many new features such as GPS (users with GPS-enabled phones (like the Nokia E71) can automatically create a "GPS stamp" for every record collected AND automatically see the results on a Google map, all within EpiSurveyor.org), advanced logic, including skip logic; numeric range limits for data entry; and a much better user interface for the web-backend.
EpiSurveyor is used by organizations around the world. One organization, TulaSalud in Guatemala, uses EpiSurveyor for maternal health. The video below (en Espanol) explains how the organization is using the tool.
Video informativo de TulaSalud, sobre la aplicación del sistema de monitoreo epidemiológico aplicado con la tecnología de EpiSurveyor, el cual pretende tener a tiempo real el reporte epidemiológico de las comlunidades.
