E-imci: improving pediatric health care in low-income countries

  • Authors:

  • Brian DeRenzi;Neal Lesh;Tapan Parikh;Clayton Sims;Werner Maokla;Mwajuma Chemba;Yuna Hamisi;David S hellenberg;Marc Mitchell;Gaetano Borriello

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;D-tree International \' Dimagi Inc., Boston, MA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley , CA, USA;Dimagi Inc., Boston, MA, USA;Ifakara Health Research & Development Centre, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania;Ifakara Health Research & Development Centre, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania;Ifakara Health Research & Development Centre, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania;Ifakara Health Research & Development Centre, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania;D-tree International \' Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Every year almost 10 million children die before reaching the age of five despite the fact that two-thirds of these deaths could be prevented by effective low-cost interventions. To combat this, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) treatment algorithms. In Tanzania, IMCI is the national policy for the treatment of childhood illness. This paper describes e-IMCI, a system for administering the IMCI protocol using a PDA. Our preliminary investigation in rural Tanzania suggests that e-IMCI is almost as fast as the common practice and potentially improves care by increasing adherence to the IMCI protocols. Additionally, we found clinicians could quickly be trained to use e-IMCI and were very enthusiastic about using it in the future.