mHealth4Afrika Beta v1 Validation in Rural and Deep Rural Clinics in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa

摘要

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, focused on supporting Horizon 2020 Societal challenges and Sustainable Development Goal 3. It is researching and evaluating the potential impact of co-designing and developing an open source, multilingual enabled mHealth platform to support quality community-based primary maternal healthcare delivery at semi-urban, rural and deep rural clinics, based on end-user requirements in Southern Africa (Malawi, South Africa), East Africa (Kenya) & Horn of Africa (Ethiopia). This paper aims to share the co-design process applied to develop and validate Beta platform v1, and the implications this had on the design of subsequent iterations of the beta platform. The Beta platform v1 validation was undertaken with 36 participants from 11 healthcare clinics across Northern Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November - December 2017, using a mix of ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews. These findings have informed the co-design of the subsequent iterations of the mHealth4Afrika beta platform, which is being used in the participating clinics on a phased basis during Q3 - Q4 2018. This platform integrates Electronic Medical Records, Electronic Health Records, medical sensors, visualisation and automatically generate monthly health indicators, thus supporting better clinical care and decision making, and freeing up time for clinical care and continuous professional medical education, thus reducing mortality rates. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa to improve health outcomes and stregthen health systems.