| dc.description.abstract | Evidence
-
based strategic decisions, planning, budgeting, policy formulation at all levels of health
care can only be made possible if there is complete, accurate, timely health information.
However, the use of manual reporting forms
continues to increase frequency of errors and
increases the workload at
the
community unit by community health volunteers (CHVs). The
ubiquitous wide adoption of
mobile
phones approximated at 78% in Kenya has been seen as a
potential technology avenue to i
mprove current community based health information system
process flows. Taking advantage of this potential, we designed and piloted a simple SMS
-
Based
reporting system for the CHVs and assessed its
potential
to improve timeliness in reporting,
arithmetic a
ccuracy, data completeness, cost and bottlenecks reduction in data flow in Kinamba
Community Unit
, Kenya. The SMS
-
Based reporting system helped reduce annual transport cost
by 97%, over 3 days’ time saving in collating the data, improve
d
CHVs reporting rat
e by 16%
within the
3
-
month period, eliminate manual aggregation which was inaccurately done according
to 94% of
the
users in agreement
. This application also removed the
“
distance barrier
”
which
previously affected
logistical manual delivery and
submissio
n of the reports. This research
therefore recommends the use of self
-
sustaining open source technologies to ensure efficient and
easy data collection, transmission and analysis systems for quicker response. | en_US |
