SMS/Text Capabilities in Africa

Community Introductions
1

My Wife and I built and run a Hospital in the rural Highlands of Northern Tanzania.

One of our current areas of focus, is expanding and improving our Chronic Diseases Program; we have a lot of Patients with Diabetes and Hypertension. While currently in the US, getting some medical issues handled, I’ve noticed that all the Doctors use SMS Messaging to remind us of appointments. I would love to figure out how to do something similar from our Hospital in Karatu.

Getting our Patients to return for Appointments, or to attend our Weekly Chronic Diseases Clinics has been a real challenge, and I’d love to find a way we could institute a reminder system via SMS.

Anybody have any ideas that might help???

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2

Hi @doctorfrank, and welcome to the CHT forum!

Your program sounds like a great initiative and the CHT supports the functionality that you are looking for. The CHT supports SMS messaging for care coordination, alerts, and notifications. It also supports integration with the Africa’s Talking SMS Aggregator which facilitates SMS messaging in several countries, including Tanzania.

If you have a technical team (See background skills required) to help you build this system, here are some resources that could be useful to get started:

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any follow-up questions.