29 November 2017
The first iteration of the mHealth4Afrika beta application was validated with health facilities in the Eastern Cape, South Africa during November and December 2017.
The District Health Office, Ministry of Health for Eastern Cape selected the following health facilities to participate in this validation phase: Anglo African Road Clinic, Grahamstown, Raglan Road Clinic, Grahamstown (semi-urban clinic) and Algoa Park Clinic, Port Elizabeth.
In preparation for the installation of mHealth4Afrika into the clinics, a site visit was undertaken with each health clinic to determine the necessary equipment to be installed, including a router to support interaction between the tablets and laptop hosting the system. Application training was undertaken initially with the nurses responsible for maternal healthcare. Two of the clinics who undertook the formal evaluation of the beta application in South Africa had been using the system to capture client information for some weeks in advance of the formal evaluation.
This validation phase was very informative in terms of validating the data sets and workflow for medical history, obstetric history, maternal healthcare (antenatal care stages and delivery) and usability issues from a user interface, workflow, functionality and data collection perspective. This informed preparation of the updated user requirements and user interface workflow, functionality and data collection specification to the included in the next iteration of mHealth4Afrika. It also validated the initial data sets for the Child under 5 program.
The participants found the system functionality to be comprehensive and practical, facilitating them to set up system users, assign access rights, manage clinic appointments, search and retrive patient electronic health records, view a patient overview page with visualisation of vital sign readings over the different ANC visits, capture and retrieve patient data related to different visits.
Following an evaluation session with the clinics in Grahamstown, a briefing meeting was undertaken with the District Health Office, Ministry of Health for Eastern Cape in Grahamstown on 28 November 2017. This was attended by the mHealth4Afrika team (IIMC and Nelson Mandela University), a representative from each of the validation clinics and the official in the District Health Office responsible for maternal care. This meeting was very useful, sharing experiences from the clinics with the District Health office and providing more detailed information on mHealth4Afrika activities in the other beneficiary countries.