News: Digital Health

Thanks to the power of data, government officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) discovered that 27% of health workers receiving government salaries and 42% of those receiving risk allowances in two large provinces—Kasaï Central and Kasaï—were ghost workers. In response, the Ministry of Public Health rapidly reallocated funds to cover 781 salaries and 2,613 risk allowances for real health workers, such as nurses and midwives who...

I’ve done my share of training district health officers and others in low-resource settings. I know that the vast majority of health workers who report data in district offices or health facilities in the low- and middle-income countries where IntraHealth International works are on congested 2G mobile networks in small towns. Which means they’re waiting—waiting for web applications to load over poor Internet connections. Complete and accurate...

Digital health interventions benefit enormously when implementers document and learn from past and current digital health projects. This is where knowledge management (KM) can help. Knowledge management is a systematic practice that helps you learn from others and helps others outside your project learn from you. It is an inherently social process, largely dependent on making sure systems and processes are in place and staff are incentivized to...

A 2015 study revealed that 50% of health workers in Uganda’s public sector weren’t showing up, or came to work but left early to collect dual pay at another facility. Today, that number is down to 11.9%, thanks to a new monitoring system that helps health officials track and analyze attendance data and take appropriate actions against chronically absent staff. Health worker absenteeism undermines staff morale and the quality of care patients...

Allison Annette Foster was enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with her family in Dallas when her phone chimed. Her cheer faded as a clinical emergency began to unfold in a string of text messages among a group of nurses eight time zones away. It was the middle of the night in rural Zambia, and a 39-year-old pregnant woman had arrived at a local health post. A young nurse there was alone, as is often the case, and unsure of what to do. So he grabbed his...

“As you can see, my boss and I are the only two health workers serving at this facility,” a nurse named Martha told us at a local dispensary in Tanzania’s remote Geita region. “I normally take charge of the facility in his absence,” she said. “It has always been a challenge reaching out to him for assistance in such moments. Due to lack of airtime credits, sometimes I just beep his number and wait for him to call back.” We talked with over 1,000...

This post originally appeared in TechCrunch. Deep in a rural village in India outside the city of Jhansi, children play on dirt roads where goats and cows roam. The humble and colorful homes have mud floors, and women collect drinking water from wells. All the sights and sounds are quintessential aspects of the region, with the exception of one feature—the use of smartphones to save lives. In this village, women healthcare workers, known as...

As the election dates have just been declared for Uttarakhand along with Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur, this is as good a time as any to shine a spotlight on an exciting initiative Uttarakhand has embarked on. A new state formed in 2000 (which is fairly young in the Indian federal scheme of things), and its challenges are unique. From limited revenue sources (tourism, its mainstay, has taken a hit since the 2013 flash floods; hence it...

This week IntraHealth International announced the launch of the iHRIS Foundation, a new structure to manage the continuing growth of the iHRIS platform of open source health workforce information systems software and the global community that supports it. Developed by IntraHealth with funding from USAID beginning in 2006, iHRIS is now used by 24 countries to manage over one million health worker records. Health sector leaders use iHRIS data to...

Here’s some trivia to chew on: if Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, were a country, it would rank among the most populous in the world. Population is widely held as a precious asset, particularly in a country with a young population like India. But to capitalise on that asset, one of the factors that needs to be put in place is health care distribution. Compared to our South Asian neighbours and Sub-Saharan African countries, and also...