2017 ICT4D Conference

Medic Mobile, along with our partners Living Goods (LG), aims to support community health workers (CHWs) and create a novel, community-based outbreak surveillance system. The envisioned system will facilitate door-to-door outbreak surveillance, provide decision support for CHWs and families, and enable rapid reporting of potential outbreaks.

Medic Mobile’s open-source, offline-enabled mobile app includes decision support for CHWs as they provide door-to-door care, shows an automated and integrated task list based on actions and configured rules, displays profiles and context for the people served by each CHW, and gives CHWs access to a mobile dashboard showing their progress towards goals.

In 2017, Medic Mobile will integrate outbreak reporting into Living Goods’ existing app for CHWs, automate sharing for indicator-based and event-based surveillance data, and co-design alerts and follow-up systems with surveillance units and the Ministries of Health in Uganda and Kenya. To our knowledge, this would be the first outbreak reporting tool embedded within an integrated, comprehensive CHW application and the first community-based surveillance system in either country to leverage mobile technology.

In the planned system, CHWs will be trained by LG to identify symptoms for epidemic-prone illnesses such as measles, meningitis, VHF, cholera, and AFP. CHWs will be able to report symptoms within the Medic Mobile app, using a new “action” made available on any community member’s profile. Reports will be forwarded immediately to the Integrated Disease Surveillance Response (IDSR) system or established surveillance contacts.

Medic Mobile, Ministries of Health, and our partners aim to decrease the time to detect those priority diseases, improve global health security, contain outbreaks, and protect the health of citizens. This presentation will discuss our progress in this project to date by sharing learnings and data.