mHEALTH-PHC: A community informatic tool for primary healthcare in India

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has made a significant impact on the functioning of enterprises and the urban communities. However benefits of ICT revolution are yet to reach the rural communities. In this paper, we show how communities in rural area can benefit from informatics, for their primary healthcare needs. We describe an innovative community informatic tool called 'mHEALTH-Primary Health Care' (mHEALTH-PHC), to meet the primary healthcare requirements of the community, developed after studying the needs and the logistic problems related to primary healthcare of the rural tribal population in villages. The paper also covers the adoption challenges and how they are dealt with. mHEALTH-PHC solution is designed, considering the existing infrastructure of public health system in the rural area. The field experience shows that healthcare personnel involved at various levels in Primary Health Center (PHC) are comfortable in using the tool and are enthusiastic to employ such a tool for efficient service to the community. Satisfaction of both, the health personnel and the end beneficiaries is the first level of success for making a mark. mHEALTH-PHC has crossed the first level barrier.

TulaSalud: An m-health system for maternal and infant mortality reduction in Guatemala

“…The use of m-health solutions to support the primary health care system in rural areas of developing countries is a very promising trend that has been explored in several projects. In Uganda the RapidSMS system was used to manage the roll out of malaria's rapid diagnostic test 8 ; in Zambia a SMS system was employed to reduce delay in sending infant HIV testing results from a centralized laboratory to remote rural health facilities; 9 in Malawi a SMS system was designed to improve communication among health workers for family planning and reproductive health in rural areas 10 and to improve influenza surveillance; 11 in Botswana m-health is used for improving clinical education, decision making, and patient adherences; 12,13 and in India a m-health systems was used to build a health information system 14 . These studies were mostly focused on improving health processes and only a few of them analysed the impact on health indicators, such as HIV virological failure.…”

mSwasthya: A mobile-enabled personal health record management system

“…From deployment of hospital information systems and telemedicine networks, to the recent use of mobile health, Indian healthcare delivery system has shown improved patient outcomes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. However, with the expenditure on healthcare equivalent to just 1.3% of India's GDP in the year 2012, the challenges exist [8].…”