Many developing countries don’t have enough data to accurately track such scourges as child malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. To help address this problem, Washington, D.C.- based DataDyne has introduced wireless EpiSurveyor, a free, open-source software package that allows health care workers to create their own data collection forms, download them onto cell phones, and text data back to a central database.
An earlier version of the software that runs on handheld PDAs is already used by regional health officers in every country of sub-Saharan Africa and is supported by the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone FoundationTechnology Partnership, the World Health Organization, and many ministries of health. The new version of EpiSurveyor for cell phones is expected to be even more popular.
Indeed, in a field test last August in Nakuru, Kenya, ministry of health workers reported back that they preferred collecting data on a cell phone rather than a PDA because they would need to carry only one device and wouldn’t have to use a stylus (which they can easily lose). And as the costs of cell phones and cell phone service go down, their availability and usage will go up.
DataDyne co-founder Joel Selanikio, a physician and epidemiologist, says that the more easily and inexpensively health care workers can collect data, the more accurately and more frequently they will do this necessary work. “If we want to target malaria, we have to measure it; then after starting a program, ask, ‘Gee, has it had any effect? Are deaths within the community down? Are sick days because of malaria down?’ All this comes from surveys.”
Workers in Zambia successfully used the PDA version of the software last summer, going house to house to determine the percentage of children vaccinated during the country’s campaign against measles. Another application under development is hospital supervision: Once a month, ministry of health workers will determine whether hospital workers are trained in childhood illness, record keeping materials are adequate, essential antibiotics are stocked, and vaccines are refrigerated at the right temperature.
In some instances, collecting better data on hospitals will cause a stir. “Where people have been running their health systems without good information and have been making decisions on a whim, they won’t be happy to find out exactly how badly they’re doing,” says Selanikio. “In Zambia, for instance, workers using EpiSurveyor found that 65 percent of clinics had within the last month run out of all the essential malaria meds. So the people responsible for stocking them were called onto the carpet.”
But mostly, he says, everyone from donors to heads of health ministries will be much happier with better data coming in. He says they’re already clamoring for new features that DataDyne is currently developing. “If there’s an outbreak of bird flu, a text message could go to every World Health Organization employee in the world, they could download a bird flu form, and a person in Geneva could see the entire data set, and you could see it by country, too,” says Selanikio.
“The proliferation of cell phones has forced us to dream bigger,” says Selanikio. “We can actually do much more than we ever thought we could.”
Read more stories by Jennifer Roberts.