medical documents

GUIDE: Getting Medical Information into the Hands of Community Health Workers

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Mar 10, 2010

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GUIDE: Getting Medical Information into the Hands of Community Health Workers data sheet 5050 Views

For community health workers who are far from medical libraries and urban centers, staying up-to-date on the latest medical advancements and disease treatments can be difficult. GUIDE, developed by AED-Satellife, is a conversion and content management system that transforms medical literature into HTML forms that are easily accessible over a mobile phone. 

GUIDE currently runs on smartphones (Samsung I780) in a pilot program in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. For the last year, 50 nurses from three different branches of local hospitals have used mobiles to stay up to date on medical developments. 

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://www.healthnet.org/guide
Organization involved in the project?: 
AED Satellife
Project goals: 

The projects goals are:

  • Create a mobile library of medical information that is accessible anywhere, at any time, over a mobile phone
  • Change existing attitudes about technology in developing countries 
  • Create a self-sustaining medical information system

 

Brief description of the project: 

In rural locations, doctors and nurses are often acting in isolation, separated from the medical community and easy access to information. GUIDE essentially takes medical and treatment documents and makes them accessible for users with small devices by converting the documents into HTML, which makes the documents legible on any browser that supports HTML. 

Target audience: 

The target audience is community health workers.

Detailed Information
Mobile Tools Used: 
GUIDE
Length of Project (in months) : 
13
Status: 
Ongoing
What worked well? : 
  • Rapid pick-up of the project by the community health care workers
  • A trickle-down dissemination effect as the nurses with phones shared the resources with other health workers who were not part of the pilot
  • Partnerships with local organizations who provided documents for conversation, and local technical support

 

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 
  • Overcoming sexist views about women and technology
  • The original plan to put the program on PDAs was scrapped, and was moved to smartphones in order to take advantage of Internet access
  • Navigating health buraucracies in the implementation