Ketcia Ovillus, is one of only five community health workers serving the small rural Haitian community of Robin’s 9,000 residents. She spends hours traveling the rough terrain to visit her patients in the mornings and returns to the dispensary by afternoon to assist medical staff.
For the past several years, she has been able to track details on her patients using an app adapted by her employer. The app called CommCare www.commcarehq.org was developed by Dimagi www.dimagi.com, a software social enterprise founded out of MIT’s Media Lab www.media.mit.edu in partnership with a program called “Services de Sante de Qualite pour Haiti” (SSQH).
CommCare is deployed on Android smartphones or on locally produced tablets called Surtabs http://surtab.com. The app enables health works to improve referrals between the community and medical facilities where more highly trained medical staff reside. Smart phone apps used in field work are not new to Haiti.
However, the intuitiveness and dexterity of the CommCare app is new to many communities. In addition, the app reinforces counseling through audio messages, supports health best practices, and improves the speed of data transmission. For example, the ability to track patients in the community becomes critical when dealing with at-risk patients, including patients with HIV or tuberculosis.
Because the data doesn’t need to be uploaded to the CommCare cloud on an ongoing basis, community workers can visit patients and collect information with little or no internet connectivity when it is convenient, and then upload the data to the CommCare registry.
There are approximately 300 community health workers who have been trained to use the CommCare app nationwide. The goal is to have 2,000 workers trained in 2016 by integrating the CommCare app into the training program. The goal is to use the app to help as many as two million people.