Disruptive Digital Tools for Community Health Workers (CHWs)
MLC Vanguard | Created by Living Goods
We aim to digitally empower thousands of government community health workers (CHWs) to provide accurate care and prompt follow-ups by using a smartphone app that details every patient contact, enables real-time performance management of health workers in outlying villages, and detects early outbreaks.
8,510,106 Lives Impacted
Pregnancy Registration, Triage, and Reminders: Our mobile tools enable CHWs to register pregnant mothers and assess risk factors to triage cases in need of immediate referral or follow up. Family-Planning Tool: The Smart Health app captures the family-planning status of every woman of reproductive age and facilitates a guided discussion for counseling. The app helps guide personalized referrals for long-term options, sends automated refill reminders for short-term methods, and tracks referrals to family-planning clinics. Immunization Targeting Tool: With support from the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiatives (Gavi), Living Goods created a tool to help CHWs pinpoint under-immunized children. Both CHWs and parents will receive reminders until the child is up-to-date on all immunizations. Facility Referral Linkage: With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Living Goods is testing a tablet-based system at local health facilities that link to the Smart Health app, alerting facilities about incoming high-risk referrals. These facilities can then digitally notify the referring CHW when their patient received care and how best to follow up.
The Innovation
Working in partnership with Medic Mobile, Living Goods created the Smart Health app that uses a basic clinical decision support system (CDSS) to ensure consistent and accurate diagnoses and smart workflows for pregnancy care, childhood diseases, nutrition, family planning, and immunization tracking. The app also allows CHWs to collect data that is compatible and integrated with government District Health Information Software 2, an open-source software platform for reporting, analysis, and dissemination of data for many national health programs that support decision-making for better and more targeted service delivery. Often, a lack of accountability impedes effective health delivery. The vast majority of health data in Africa is still collected on paper in a process that is both slow and notoriously unreliable. In contrast, our mobile tools digitally capture a mobile number and GPS location for every patient visit and provide supervisors with dashboards that show the performance of every health worker against targets in real-time, advancing performance management in distant villages from an era of bicycle-powered delivery of health data to light speed dissemination.
Implemented in
Kenya and Uganda
Get in touch
Abdullah Kanneh, Business Development Associate
About Living Goods
Living Goods saves lives at scale by supporting digitally empowered community health workers. We work with governments and partners to leverage smart mobile technology, rigorously strengthen performance, and relentlessly innovate to cost-effectively deliver high-quality, impactful health services.
