Community Health Management Information System|DHIS2 based mHealth

Community based health service providers are organizations who provide health services at community level through community health workers(CHW) or health assistants(HA) or Accredited Social Health Activists(ASHA) or Community Health Volunteers (CHV). To make healthcare accessible to people, hospitals are not enough. Even the presence of the hospitals in large numbers can’t ensure good health of the people unless good quality first contact care and follow up care at village level are provided.

Community health workers visit patients regularly at their home to deliver health services. The functions of community health workers include providing first contact health care for common and important health problems, providing sound counsel for raising health awareness and organising referrals for those problems that they can’t manage. They are engaged in helping pregnant women to plan and receive appropriate care during pregnancy. They are also trained to manage non-communicable chronic diseases and selected childhood diseases.

The Need

The availability of information on health services performance can empower Health Workers and their supervisors to improve the quality of the community-based health services. Currently paper based registers are the norm. Also, there is a need to link the health information generated by CHWs to the facility-based health information systems(HIS) or EMR systems for referral care and aggregated reporting.

Community based health services are mostly delivered under challenging and low resource environments. Hence the information systems are expected to work around such resource limitations. Further, community health workers come with only primary level education hence the application should assist them in right ways to provide meaningful counseling to the patients.

The Solution

We have customized DHIS2 to build the Community Health Management Information System (C-HMIS) . The solution contains two components. First, the server component for program managers, deployed on a private cloud server. Second, the mobile application for Health Workers that runs on android mobiles or tablets. The mobile devices communicate with the server over cellular data network.

The mobile app replaces the paper based register used by Health Assistants. On top of that, it helps them to plan home visits, capture data from patients and educate patients by using multimedia clips shared by the program managers. The server backend helps the program manager to administrate the mobile application and run analytics on the data captured using the mobile devices.

The C-HMIS can be integrated with external systems like a Health Information System or a Hospital Management System with EMR to transfer either aggregate level or patient level health information.

Main Features

Population health management

Manage health data of population both at aggregate level and at patient level from birth to death. Each person gets an identifier and a dashboard with consolidated view of all data collected so far.

Auto calculation of values

Automatically derive personal indicators such as BMI, child growth z-scores, EDD based on input values.

Maternal Health, Child Health & Chronic disease programs

System is pre-configured with modules for Maternal Health, Child health, Infectious diseases such as TB, Malaria, and NCDs such as Hypertension, Diabetes etc.

Visit schedule planning

Health workers can view visits due for patients as per pre-configured visit schedules categorized into villages and prioritize their day activities accordingly

Health Communications

Support patient education and counselling by playing audio/ video clips and slideshows. Multimedia elements can be uploaded for each visit type and will get pushed to mobile devices automatically. Statistics on whether the multimedia was played, how many times and how long are relayed back to the server periodically.

Track high risk patients

Highlight high risk pregnant mothers and high risk malnourished children in the reports and visit schedules so that they can be prioritized health service delivery.

Automated text messages

Send text messages as reminders for upcoming visits or immunization. Send promotional messages for encouraging institutional health delivery. Messages can also be sent manually as needed.

Reporting and Data visualization

Mobile device will send all the captured data and statistics to the central server when network is available. Program manager can use this data for both patient level and aggregate level reporting. Reporting application on the server is user friendly and supports different visualization options.

Integration with HIS/EMR

If referral care is provided along with community based health services, C-HMIS can be integrated with facility based Health Information system. Thus doctors can get an integrated view of patient clinical information collected at both facility level and community level. C-HMIS system can also be integrated with national level Health Information system to report on the aggregate level community health data.

Benefits

Configurable

Program Managers can easily configure metadata for various disease programs, along with multimedia elements to be used for each visit type. The reports and visualizations can be created by the program Managers themselves using user friendly reporting app.

Offline data entry

The mobile app works even without network coverage. The data will be saved locally till the network is available. When the device comes online, mobile app automatically triggers data and metadata synchronization in the background.

Local language support

Both server component and mobile application support multiple local languages. The UI language can be switched as per user preferences.

Complete data ownership

System including the data is completely owned by the client organisation. The server component is installed on a private cloud instance owned by the client. Mobile applications communicate only with the client owned server.

Secure

Access to both server component and mobile apps are controlled using login credentials. Data is securely stored in a private cloud instance with standard encryption techniques.

Training and professional support

Nuchange team provides end-to-end implementation services including configuration, health worker training and administration training. We help you to develop local capacity for ongoing support. Nuchange also provides maintenance and support as an additional service.