Hi I’m Nick co-founder of OneDay Health (www.onedayhealth.org). We have launched 47 basic one-nurse facilities in remote parts of Uganda, and are looking to digitise patient data - starting very simple with just a handful of inputs for a pilot, patient name/village/diagnosis/treatment/payment
On initial exploration, we have found medic can do this basic tool for our pilot very well, but obviously might struggle in the long term as it is not designed to be a full EMR tool. We tried OpenMRS but it was difficult to simplify.
Do you think medic mobile can be appropriate as a very basic EMR/Patient management tool in small one-nurse facilities, or should we still try and use the more classic facility based tools?
Any suggestions at all welcome, thanks!
Welcome Nick! This is a very good question.
As you have probably noted from your research, the CHT is primarily targeted at community health use cases. However, in many situations this can look a lot like “small one-nurse facilities”. The CHT is definitely being used in environments such as this. Based on experiences with similar deployments, here are some points for consideration:
- Workflow complexity - the CHT is great for simple to moderately complex workflows on a mobile device. This works great for many ambulatory-style settings. However, it is not designed/optimized for the kind of complexity you often fine in acute care facilities. It is definitely not intended to be a full EMR.
- Multi-tasking - one big difference we have noted in typical work-styles between community health settings and more formal care facilities is that health workers in care facilities often need to be able to stop in the middle of some task and switch to another workflow before coming back to complete the original task. Currently, the CHT does not have great support for this (it is not such a high priority feature in many community heath situations). That being said, there is growing interest in the CHT community for this functionality and more development in this area is a definite possibility!
- Technology stack - the CHT is optimized for users on mobile devices who may lack stable network connectivity. It definitely can be used from a computer with a network connection and a web browser (and many deployments have a subset of users that interact with the CHT like this). However, if your users will always be behind a computer with a stable internet connection, the CHT might not be the best fit just in terms of focus (aka which problems the software is trying to address).
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