Dear Joseph and all,
"Its take on the (forcible) introduction of digital tools like apps to primary health care is instructive and needs to be taken into serious consideration as ‘digitisation’ seems to be taking over everywhere you read or look. The message needs to be that to take advantage of the positives but avoid the many negative effects of digitisation / e-health in health care delivery, including burnout of all ready scarce Human Resources for health, context is crucial, balance with paper / hard forms may be needed for a longer time than is usually allotted for the transition. Not least the extra costs involved for system and health workers themselves."
Yes indeed. The digital intervention described by Vaishnavi appears to have led to a *worsening* of quality of care.
Too often, digital interventions are introduced without an understanding of their likely impact on the ground.
Many of the negative impacts of digital interventions could and should have been avoided by pre-deployment assessment. Fellow HIFA Steering Group member Geoff Royston presented a paper on this subject in 2016, summarised in this poster:
Assessing mobile healthcare information applications for citizens in low-resource settings
https://www.hifa.org/sites/default/files/other_publications_uploads/mHIF...
The paper concludes: 'Valuable insights into the likely practical impact of mHealth inforamtion apps can be obtained, even without field-based evaluation, from a criterion-based assessment of their features'
(The paper focused on apps for the general public, but the conclusion is equally valid for apps for health workers.)
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org