DigiHealth Mobile

In Uganda, 84.4% of the population live in the rural part of the country yet most of the hospitals are built in the urban centres. This leaves a majority of our population with limited access to quality health care. In order to compensate for this, the government and non-profit organisations organise community outreach health camps regularly to ensure that the under-served portion of the population can also have access to health care services. This community outreach program is a vital part of our healthcare system yet the biggest challenge faced by the health workers who are tasked with carrying it out is the lack of a proper patient data collection and storage infrastructure. Currently, the medical teams that conduct medical outreach in the community record patient information in large books which are sometimes lost or damaged over time. This loss of data makes it difficult for the hospitals and the government to plan accurately for the drugs and equipment to be used by the community health workers. This in turn hinders proper planning by the health facility and the ministry of health who are the custodians of all health related information. At the end of the month, the community health workers are also required to compile a report using the information in the many books used during the month and submit it to the ministry of health. This is quite a tedious task because they have to manually look through a number of books and during this process, mistakes in data entry are made.

It is a mobile application and web based platform that digitizes the process of data collection by community outreach health workers. With this tool, the community health workers simply go with a mobile device during the health camps, collect the patient information in the application and send it immediately to the hospital database thereby eliminating the tedious process of writing in books and transferring the information at the end of the day. Our system also automatically generates the reports making the health workers’ work easier. When examining patients in the community, they are now able to access the patients’ history with this app so that they can make an accurate diagnosis. Our target clients majorly operate in rural parts of the country where internet access is still difficult and expensive therefore we designed it to be able to collect and save data without internet access and synchronize with the hospital database to transfer the data when they can finally access the internet.
We also have an advanced dashboard that can generate visualised reports to aid the health facilities in producing accurate statistics out of the patient data collected.

It is an innovative solution because it is improving on already existing open source data collection technology. Digi Health Mobile was designed with the financial status of African health organisations in mind therefore it is a cheap tool. We designed it to be as user friendly and provide as much support and training as needed by our clients as possible because we are aware that their knowledge of technology is limited. We use the principle of human-centred design when developing this tool therefore we customise the user interface to make data entry easier for every user. Another innovative aspect of the Digi Health Mobile is its highly improved offline capability. Our target clients majorly operate in rural parts of the country where internet access is still difficult and expensive therefore we designed it to be able to collect and save data without internet access and synchronize with the hospital database to transfer the data when they can finally access the internet.