Monday was the big day for the mother baby pair tracking project where we rolled out 20 smartphones to five sites around South Africa in one of the poorest townships in the country called Khayelitsha.

m2m works filling the gaps where the country’s medical system fails to provide adequate medical attention to patients, and in a place where the HIV rate is one out of ever four people, time is critical for these women.

The tracking program is designed to help m2m employees locate and update the client’s record from the field using smart phones to help make them adhere to the medication schedule. If they fail to take the medication on time, the body can build up a resistance and it’s likely they will pass the virus on to the baby.

Along with client record retrieval, the system also adds the electronic forms to queues based on where they are in the antenatal or postnatal process, notifies the mentor mother of upcoming tasks, and will go as far as sending an SMS to the client for their appointment.

A couple pictures from the rollout from the sites:

This week I started the user acceptance training (UAT) for one of the largest rollouts of mHealth to date at mothers2mothers. The system will capture information through a smart phone and record all the data throughout the PMTCT cascade to help deliver healthy babies.

The mHealth system for tracking and evaluation will be used to link the HIV positive mother starting with the first visit at any of the sites in South Africa, until 18 months after she has delivered her baby. The m2m mentor mother will have the device on hand and be able to query key indicators during the PMTCT cycle which should compliment the entire process. Because of the migratory nature of the clients, previously it was difficult to measure how effective the program was when the mothers went from one site to another, sometimes in the same day. The previous paper based system would not allow the mentor mother from one site to know that the client had already visited a m2m client, which clinic, when, and for what.

The system is using a custom built application installed on the smart phone and is connected to a custom server in the main office. The application will also send notifications based on a queue to help with active client followup, or ACFU.

This very ambitious process is scheduled for rollout next week, so stay tuned for more updates from the field!

Some pictures from training: