The five day M&E meeting for MCHIP’s field partners has been packed with activities that have kept the 70+ participants very busy throughout the week. On Wednesday, we decided to take a break from the classroom structure of presentations and lectures, and head to various health facilities around Nairobi for some hands on mHealth practice. mHealth is all about using mobile devices as tools and services within health systems in developing countries. Today we wanted to give the meeting participants some hands on practice using mobile phones for collecting health facility data.
 
It was also a welcome break from the Ole Sereni Hotel meeting room and its slow internet connection. A total of nine teams were assembled consisting of 5-6 persons each and we loaded into separate vehicles for the drive to the facility. Nairobi traffic has gotten quite horrific and so we picked the early afternoon as the time for the visit. My team traveled to the Jericho Health Facility, a small clinic operating in Nairobi’s Makadara district.
 
The Kenya Ministry of Health uses what is known as “Form 711A” for summarizing client visit and service activities, aggregated by intervention areas.  One of the facility activities was to enter this “7-11”data onto the mobile phones from one service area for a given month.

Nokia 3,100 phones were programmed with the EpiSurveyor software corresponding to four of these service areas. One participant from each team sat down with the Register and the completed 7-11 form and entered the data. Once the entry was complete, the data was sent to the central EpiSurveyor server and available for viewing over the web.
 
All of the teams reported back as having a good experience with the field visit, including a warm welcome at each facility by the nurses and nurse-midwives on duty and almost all showed evidence of excellent record keeping and well maintained patient registers.

It will be exciting to see how each participant takes this experience back with them to their country and utilizes the power of mobile technology in their program work.

David Cantor
Senior IT Advisor
MCHIP