Mhealth application for community health volunteers data collection: a case of Makueni county

Abstract

The Community Health Strategy in Kenya was introduced to strengthen linkages between communities and the formal health system. However, one of the major drawbacks has been reporting. The manual process for capturing data using Ministry of Health registers by Community Health Volunteers have presented challenges in accuracy, completeness and timeliness of health data from Community Units which has a negative impact in health service delivery due to the delays in quality data reaching the health facilities. The healthcare industry is undergoing a major paradigm shift due to the rapid advances and developments in mobile technology, mHealth that use mobile devices and other wireless technology in medical care. This research focuses on using the dynamic system development methodology to develop a mobile application that will be used by the Community Health Volunteers to collect health data from the household. Data collection will involve both primary and secondary sources which will include literature review and questionnaires. The findings of the research established that the application addresses challenges faced by the manual data collection, the manual register takes 4 weeks be delivered to the health facility using the mobile application it takes only minutes for the data to be availed. Above 93% the respondents indicated that the application assists in improvement in accuracy and 100% of the respondents indicated that the application contributes in collecting complete data, thus contribute to improvement of service delivery to the community. The application should be scaled-up and deployed to all counties in the country.