Mobile Technology in Public Health
The project that I’m working on with Emmanuel International, NJIRA, is large in scope and size. It encompasses work around agriculture, maternal and child health, disaster risk reduction, and gender. It’s targeting 240,000+ beneficiaries and has 166 performance indicators that need to be reported to USAID on a quarterly basis. Needless to say, this translates to a lot of data.
One component of the performance monitoring and evaluation (M+E) work that I am really looking forward to is the use of mobile apps for data collection. Given the lack of technological resources, public health data collection in developing countries often involves the use of paper-based tools in the field followed by transcription into electronic formats at a later point. This is a cumbersome process and results in a higher chance of data error.
For NJIRA, we are planning to use a progressive approach to data collection by employing sim-card operated tablets that will be used by our field coordinators when collecting village household data. The data will be inputted into an app which will feed it directly into our online master database, reducing the need for transcription. Given that roads in villages are typically unpaved and difficult to locate, GPS will be used to mark the longitude and latitude coordinates of households. The coordinates will be linked to Google maps on our online database to create a map of all registered households.
My Global Health Corps (GHC) co-fellow (‘cofi’) Pilirani Banda and I are in charge of rolling out the implementation of these mobile apps. We are one of the first NGOs in the area to use mobile apps in data collection so are acting as trendsetters — which is exciting but also anxiety-inducing. We do not have local best practices to rely on and I am expecting some growing pains.
Mobile technology is currently a hot topic in public health and its use has extended beyond data collection and into clinical treatment, producing a new field- mHealth (an abbreviation for ‘mobile health’). A lot of healthcare delivery in places with a severe shortage of clinicians, especially in hard to reach rural areas in developing countries, is increasingly being carried out by Community Health Workers (CHWs).
CHWs are non-clinical individuals who are given basic training to assist in promoting healthcare. In some places, CHWs are using simple cell phones to collect clinical data, such as vital signs or notes on symptoms, that can be sent to clinicians for review. In NJIRA, we see the application of mobile technology to data collection as just the beginning and have ambitious plans to extend its use to programmatic purposes, such as tracking the distribution of food rations.
