The document discusses how mobile tools can help with disease surveillance in low-income countries. It notes that timely, complete, and high-quality surveillance is difficult to achieve simultaneously. Mobile phones provide opportunities for more complete surveillance, but also challenges like usability, technology types, training costs, and pilot projects that don't scale. The organization InSTEDD has used mobile tools like GeoChat to help health workers during disasters and develop other solutions that don't require digital literacy. Effective surveillance requires clear goals and a balanced portfolio approach using mobile tools as part of broader systems and addressing issues like integration, data quality, and incentives.
The whole lifecycle of health surveillance is being transformed by communication and collaboration technologies. The increase of mobile communication tools available in rural and urban areas, the improvement of diagnostic platforms and the merging of otherwise disparate data creates opportunities for more timely, more complete, and higher quality information available for analysis and response.We will show field examples of how structured and unstrucutured communications between village volunteers and client populations has or hasn't helped surveillance, how to improve data reporting in almost illiterate populations, and how data aggregation and sharing has been done at the disease, national, and international levels and what have been some of the practices and patterns worth repeating and avoiding. As health surveillance increasingly reframes itself as a knowledge management problem, using appropriate ICTs everyone from authorities to clients can be more effective in improving personal and public health.
Gaps in Research-
The whole lifecycle of health surveillance is being transformed by communication and collaboration technologies. The increase of mobile communication tools available in rural and urban areas, the improvement of diagnostic platforms and the merging of otherwise disparate data creates opportunities for more timely, more complete, and higher quality information available for analysis and response.We will show field examples of how structured and unstrucutured communications between village volunteers and client populations has or hasn't helped surveillance, how to improve data reporting in almost illiterate populations, and how data aggregation and sharing has been done at the disease, national, and international levels and what have been some of the practices and patterns worth repeating and avoiding. As health surveillance increasingly reframes itself as a knowledge management problem, using appropriate ICTs everyone from authorities to clients can be more effective in improving personal and public health.
The whole lifecycle of health surveillance is being transformed by communication and collaboration technologies. The increase of mobile communication tools available in rural and urban areas, the improvement of diagnostic platforms and the merging of otherwise disparate data creates opportunities for more timely, more complete, and higher quality information available for analysis and response.We will show field examples of how structured and unstrucutured communications between village volunteers and client populations has or hasn't helped surveillance, how to improve data reporting in almost illiterate populations, and how data aggregation and sharing has been done at the disease, national, and international levels and what have been some of the practices and patterns worth repeating and avoiding. As health surveillance increasingly reframes itself as a knowledge management problem, using appropriate ICTs everyone from authorities to clients can be more effective in improving personal and public health.