Keep it simple: designing a user-centred digital information system to support chronic disease management in low/middle-income countries
Daniel Burka, Reena Gupta, Andrew E Moran, Jennifer Cohn, Sohel R Choudhury, Tim Cheadle, Rahul Mullick, Thomas R Frieden, Daniel Burka, Reena Gupta, Andrew E Moran, Jennifer Cohn, Sohel R Choudhury, Tim Cheadle, Rahul Mullick, Thomas R Frieden
Abstract
Objective: Implement a user-centred digital health information system to facilitate rapidly and substantially increasing the number of patients treated for hypertension in low/middle-income countries.
Methods: User-centred design of Simple, an offline-first app for mobile devices to record patient clinical visits and a web-based dashboard to monitor programme performance.
Results: The Simple mobile application scaled rapidly over the past 4 years to reach more than 11 400 primary care facilities in four countries with over 3 million patients enrolled. Simple achieved median duration for new patient registration of 76 s (IQR 2 s) and follow-up visit entry of 13 s (IQR 1 s).
Conclusions: A fast, easy-to-use digital information system for hypertension programmes that accommodates healthcare worker time constraints by minimising data entry and focusing on key performance indicators can successfully reach scale in low-resource settings.
Keywords: Global Health; Health Information Systems; Medical Informatics Applications; Public health informatics.
Conflict of interest statement
Competing interests: None declared.
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.
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Source: PubMed