CHWs

Sana Mobile: Connecting Big-City Care to Patients in Remote Villages

Posted by MohiniBhavsar on Sep 17, 2010

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Sana Mobile: Connecting Big-City Care to Patients in Remote Villages data sheet 5256 Views

Decision making support for nurses and health workers, even when connectivity is poor or low, is possible with Sana Mobile, an Android-based mobile health application. Formerly known as Moca Mobile, the Sana technology facilitates remote consultations between health care specialists and community health workers in remote areas.

Sana Mobile started at MIT's NextLab, where developers, faculty and students collaborate to tackle a problem using mobile technology. The Sana technology was developed by Sidhant Jena, Sana team lead and Harvard Business School student and Russell Ryan, lead engineer and MIT student.

When general practitioners lack the expertise to diagnose a case, they refer patients to specialists, who may not be easily accessible. The Sana technology addresses the lack of accessibility to specialty care in places, where specialist doctors and tertiary care centers are sparse.

How does Sana Mobile work?

Website URL: 
http://www.sanamobile.org/inde...
Organization involved in the project?: 
Sana Mobile
Project goals: 

One of the largest problems facing the developing world is a lack of trained physicians. While there is not a shortage of untrained or semi-trained workforce, many health workers in many developing nations are not able to dispense adequate care due to a lack of expertise.

The Sana technology seeks to address the lack of accessibility to specialty care in places, where specialist doctors and tertiary care centers are sparse.

Brief description of the project: 

Oral cancer is one of the most common cancers in India. It is related to the cultural practice of chewing paan masala and gutka, forms of chewing tobacco. It is estimated that about 40% of men and 15% of women chew tobacco on a regular basis. Detecting risk of oral cancer earlier is important for affordable treatment as late stage tumors can be very expensive to treat. To survey the risk of oral cancer in their community, Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Center and the Narayana Hrudayalaya Health to ran a pilot test in and around Bangalore over six months. One pilot was run in Belgaum, Raichur, a rural town about 12 hours away from the city of Bangalore. The other pilot was run in Bangalore. Equipped with the Sana application, ASHAs (community health workers) went door to door in and around Bangalore, asking questions and taking pictures of oral lesions, which were evaluated by oral surgeons. In six months, they were able to screen about 400 high-risk cancer patients and detected numerous lesions using Sana. Twenty ASHAs were trained in using the Sana software in Belgaum.

Target audience: 

For this pilot, risk of oral cancer was assessed for men and women chewing tobacco. But the Sana application is also being used to do a large scale risk assessment for cardiovascular disease, to screen maternal complications (e.g. preclampsia) and assess nutritional status of children.

Length of Project (in months) : 
6
Status: 
Ongoing
What worked well? : 
  • Sana invested in building local developer capacity in India. Local developers cost less than having an international technology consultant to conduct training.
  • Lots of enthusiasm from leaders at the Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital
  • Funding for Sana developers at MIT to travel to India to test and train users came from external support, not from program budget of the clients.
What did not work? What were the challenges?: 
  • Semi- to low-literacy amongst community health workers can be a challenge if an application is available in limited languages. CHWs in Belgaum did not speak Kannada (the local script) or English. Developers adapted Sana to replace text in the medical procedures with voice prompts and pictorial labels
  • Health workers/nurses were not familiar with the touchscreen and needed some additional training and practice in order to understand how to use it (i.e. using fingerpad or fingernail to enter data)
  • Cost of phone was a major limiting factor
  • Some resistance faced from physicians, who were not quick to adopt a technology-based work flow management tool
  • The Sana Team is a volunteer based organization, and it is difficult for the team of developers to contribute time resources, but they consistently offer feedback to Sana users on their google group.
Countries: 
India
Last Name: 
Dutt
First Name: 
Sayon
State/Province: 
Boston
Country: 
United States
Email: 
sayon@sanomobile.org 


 




  
The Use of Mobile Phones as a Data Collection Tool: A Report from a Household Survey in South Africa


Posted by MohiniBhavsar on Aug 17, 2010





 

        
      
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The Use of Mobile Phones as a Data Collection Tool: A Report from a Household Survey in South Africa data sheet 1766 Views

	

      
Author: 

    

            

                    Mark Tomlinson, Wesley Solomon, Yages Singh, Tanya Doherty, Mickey Chopra, Petrida Ijumba, Alexander C Tsai and Debra Jackson        

        





      
Publication Type: 

    

            

                    Journal article        

        





      
Publication Date: 

    

            

                    Dec 2009        

        





      
Abstract: 

    

            

                    
Background: To investigate the feasibility, the ease of implementation, and the extent to which
community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey


Methods: A web-based system was developed to allow electronic surveys or questionnaires to be
designed on a word processor, sent to, and conducted on standard entry level mobile phones.


Results: The web-based interface permitted comprehensive daily real-time supervision of CHW
performance, with no data loss. The system permitted the early detection of data fabrication in
combination with real-time quality control and data collector supervision.


Conclusions: The benefits of mobile technology, combined with the improvement that mobile phones offer over PDA's in terms of data loss and uploading difficulties, make mobile phones a
feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored.

        

        





      
Paper URL: 

    

            

                    http://www.biomedcentral.com/c...        

        










 




  
Pesinet: Mobile Tech and Micro-Insurance for Child Health in Mali


Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Jul 10, 2010





 

        
      
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Pesinet: Mobile Tech and Micro-Insurance for Child Health in Mali data sheet 4511 Views

	
Healthcare agents in Bamako Coura, Mali, are providing better care to children with the help of mobile phones. Healthcare agents with Pesinet, a non-profit organization based in Mali, perform weekly checkups on children and then send the results to a doctor for evaluation through a Java application.


Anne Roos-Weil, founder of Pesinet, says: 


In Sub-Sahara Africa you have a very, very high child mortality rate. […] In Mali, where our project is based, one child out of five dies before the age of five. What we realized is that they’re mostly dying because they don’t go to the doctor or the healthcare center early enough.

      
Website URL: 

    

            

                    http://www.pesinet.org/wp/        

        





      
Organization involved in the project?: 

    

            

                    Pesinet        

        





      
Project goals: 

    

            

                    
The goals of Pesinet are:


    

  • To prevent child mortality from benign diseases through regular home screenings
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  • To create an insurance plan so that health problems do not bankrupt families
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Brief description of the project: 

    

            

                    
Pesinet is a mobile healthcare service currently deployed in Bamako Coura, Mali. Parents sign up for a healthcare worker to visit their children weekly for a regular checkup. The agents collect data via mobile phone, and send it to a doctor at a healthcare center, who reviews the information for changes. The parents pay the equivalent of one Euro a month, which covers visits to the doctor in case of emergency, and provides half-price medication in case the child needs medical care. 

        

        





      
Target audience: 

    

            

                    
The target audience is parents of children under five in Bamako, Mali (for the current pilot; later it will expand to all parents of children under five who live in areas with high under-5 mortality rates in Mali). 


 

        

        







      
Length of Project (in months) : 

    

            

                    10        

        





      
Status: 

    

            

                    Ongoing        

        





      
What worked well? : 

    

            

                    
In a survey conducted by the Malian Ministry of Health, 96% of the mothers enrolled in the program reported satisfaction with Pesinet, 99% wished to recommend the service to family and friends, and 97% of the families found the service to be "very affordable."

        

        





      
What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

    

            

                    
The program's challenges are:


    

  • Breaking through the trust barrier - Pesinet found it difficult to promote the service rapidly in areas where there is little awareness of the value of prevention, as this involves a significant cultural shift. 
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  • The organization's desire to be financially self-sustaining has meant slow growth (compared to subsidized programs); the paying approach inevitably led to slower adoption than if the service were free of charge. 
    • 



 
        

        







      
Countries: 

    

            

                    Mali        

        





      
Last Name: 

    

            

                    Roos-Weil        

        





      
First Name: 

    

            

                    Anne        

        





      
State/Province: 

    

            

                    Bamako        

        





      
Country: 

    

            

                    Mali        

        





      
Email: 

    

            

                    anne.roosweil@pesinet.org