Key insights that lead to develop Smart Paper Technology
The first eye-opener and most important insight came to Shifo team when we understood that a Home-Based Record is the most important document that health workers use if they want to know child’s immunisation history and which vaccines are due for the child. This was true in all countries we investigated and observed.
The second insight was that more than 99% of parents bring the home-based record to immunisation visits.
For instance, in The Gambia, out of all immunisation visits during October-December 2019, a total of 70533 immunisation visits were recorded in all the facilities using SPT in Western Region 1 and Western Region 2, and there were 18 documented cases of visits without the Home-Based Record (0.026% of all visits).
The third insight was that health workers like working with their tally sheets and do not prioritise or even dislike the register books and monthly reporting processes. The main reason why health workers don’t like to fill in register books and monthly reports is that these tools take a lot of time to properly fill in, and they are not so useful to the health workers.
Equipped with these three insights, we designed Smart Paper Technology to simplify health workers data collection and reporting processes, eliminating steps they don’t like to do, and, keeping the steps they like to do.
Health workers need to make just one step and be comfortable in using the new solution, which brings intrinsic motivation to use the new tool. We see from observations and quantitative data that there is no motivation for health workers to go back to using the old tools. They don’t miss anything from the old tools, which has been validated by the external evaluation made in The Gambia recently.
