Human Aspects

Human Prerequisites

Warning

Even the simplest mobile health platform will probably require a full-time or near-full-time manager to keep it running and to integrate it into your existing health program. Do not spend time and money deploying a mobile health system if you do not have the human resources to make it useful!

Community health workers

ChildCount+ is a tool for community health workers to keep track of their patients and for health managers to keep track of their community health workers. ChildCount+ is not a general data collection tool (for that, see ODK) nor is it a tool that would be very useful for clinicians or for general-purpose medical record keeping (for that, see OpenMRS).

Programmers

Running ChildCount+ requires access to a software developer or at least a systems administrator. The more programming talent you have at your disposal, the more flexible and useful ChildCount+ will become. ChildCount+ is written in the Python programming language and uses the Django and RapidSMS frameworks, so people with knowledge of those technologies will be particularly useful.

FrontlineSMS might be a good alternative solution for organizations without programmers at their disposal.

Community Health Worker Program

Since we designed ChildCount+ for the Millennium Villages Project, we have incorporated elements of the MVP CHW protocols into the ChildCount+ forms, alerts, and reports.

Health IDs

One important and time-consuming part of the ChildCount+ set-up process is patient registration. Each person who is to be tracked by the ChildCount+ system must be assigned a unique ChildCount+ health identifier. Our deployments use the Childcount form +NEW (childcount.forms.PatientRegistrationForm) to assign health IDs to patients.

These health idenfiers are like primary keys into a database table – each person’s health identifier is unique within the system and is the most common way to reference to their patient record.

The Millennium Villages Project deployments use the OpenMRS IdGen Module to generate the health IDs and we use the Luhn-30 checksums to validate the IDs.

Forms

Here are examples of the ChildCount+ forms we use:

All Sites

• Danger Signs List

Sauri, Kenya

• Form A (Patient Registration)
• Form B (Household Visit and Family Planning)
• Form C (Consultation)
  • Children
  • Pregnant Women
• Form HED (Household Associationg)
• Form P (Pregnancy Forms)
  • P: Demographics
  • P2: Initial Antenatal Visit
  • P2: Follow-up Visit
• Form R (Appointment Reminder Log)
• Form V (Clinic Visit Log)

Ruhiira, Uganda

• Form A (Patient Registration)
• Form B (Household Visit)
• Form C (Consultation)
• Correction