Improving primary health care through eHealth

IeDA is a strategy that makes use of technology to accelerate the impact of primary health care in developing countries. Although one might think some environments are hostile to technology, we focus on leveraging the opportunities, local knowhow and resources to provide solutions and process that can be operationalized in such constrained contexts.

Design Approach

All the technologies used in IeDA were designed and developed following two core principles: user-centered design and ability to scale.

User‐Centered Design

IeDA strives to provide the best possible tools and processes to end-users. However, the notion of appropriateness is very relative to each group of users and their needs. We work to combine established best practices and user self-expressed needs into products that will foster quick adoption and improved health outcomes.

Ability To Scale

Scaling up mHealth interventions exposes governments and organizations to challenges ranging from change management, technology adoption to user support. While technology can be an enabler, it can also quickly become cumbersome if not adapted to a situation. This is why IeDA’s choices of technologies have always been done with scale in mind, ensuring that growing number of users and larger amounts of data would not become operational obstacles.

What We Use?

CommCare

CommCare is the platform we use to develop all IeDA’s mobile diagnostic support and data collection tools. Thanks to its simple form builder and update procedure it is easy adapt to changes in national clinical protocols and push updates remotely. As CommCare is optimized for low bandwidth environments health facilities are able to send and receive data regularly even with a simple 2G data connection.

IeDA’s monitoring tools for coaches are also built on CommCare, allowing for a single repository of data from which we are able to build comprehensive data analysis tools.

Motech Suite

Interoperability with existing health systems is a necessary condition to bringing mHealth solutions at scale. With the Motech Suite it is possible integrate mHealth and eHealth solutions through a user-friendly configuration interface. No programming skills required. IeDA relies on the Motech Suite to seamlessly send data between CommCare applications and DHIS2 instances, greatly reducing the time consuming reporting burden of health workers across health systems.

R

When it comes to processing large amounts of data and visualizing them R is a state-of-the-art solution. We build IeDA’s Dashboard with R and Shiny in order to provide sensible charts and figures online to decision makers.

Microsoft Excel

Rural areas sometimes do not have reliable nor fast internet connections. MS Excel is a great solution for such situations because it allows district data managers to remotely update data sheets when the connection is available and to work on that data offline the rest of the time.