With contributions from individuals such as Erik Hersman (of White African and Ushahidi acclaim), Steve Vosloo (a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation), Vincent Maher (internet services portfolio manager at Vodacom) and a range of others including representatives from the Kenyan government and industry players, the conference promises to be a melting pot of ideas and a platform to share experiences.

Our own Mark Fowles will be in attendance and will no doubt be tweeting about the event. He’ll also share some of the new Mobile Researcher features due to be launched officially in February and our latest initiative – Mobenzi – which seeks to create sustainable jobs by croudsourcing solutions to business problems from low income mobile phone users.

If you’re attending the conference, please be sure to get in touch.

For us, it’s a strong indication that the use of mobile and web technologies is becoming more widely accepted in the public health community as a viable and valuable tool in tackling primary health care issues.

The presentations at the conference where Mobile Researcher was involved include:

• Experiences of using cell phones in data collection in a large scale project (V. Magasana, P. Ijumba, Z. Msimela, S. Ndwandwe, N. Radebe, M. Msweli, S. Mavuso)
• Using a web based information system to manage the implementation of a randomised controlled trial (P. Ijumba, Y. Singh, M. Tomlinson)

Several other organisations present findings on studies where Mobile Researcher was also leveraged as a data collection tool.

As we work with a number of organisations with a strong focus on public health, we’ll be there to highlight how mobile and web technologies are being used to solve real public health challenges, particularly for initiatives involving community-based health workers and randomised control trials. Using mobile phones as the catalyst, practical health information systems can be established which can be used for logistics management, fieldworker monitoring, participant and patient tracking, monitoring and evaluation, and pure data collection.

We’ll also be demonstrating the latest feature enhancements to our mobile application which are due to go live in a few weeks. A few of the organisations who are using Mobile Researcher in their projects will also be presenting papers at the conference.

We hope to see you at the conference – please feel free to drop by our exhibition stand to engage, challenge and brainstorm with us. We’ll have a few handsets there for anyone interested to try out the mobile application for themselves.

I was surprised to find how political the debates were with regard to the major primary healthcare software packages and electronic record management. Very little consideration seems to be given to the usability of the many systems discussed. Presenters touted extensive feature lists while others complained about little budget for training and infrastructure. It seems that there is not much incentive for architects and designers to create these systems to be easy to use and appropriate for South Africa’s skills and infrastructure. Since there is such high cost and complex political persuasion in implementing a specific solution, departments seem to get locked in to long term contracts with specific providers. What I like about web 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS) is that there is always a risk that customers might leave for a competitor – this creates an urgent incentive to make the software really valuable and not just appealing at face value. Unfortunately with such large projects at district or national level, decisions need to be made up-front for long term commitments. From my little knowledge of the industry, it just appears that the software being created is overly complex and difficult to use.

A few speakers referenced the significant issues encountered during the NHS National Programme for IT in the UK, an endeavour claimed to be the largest IT project in history. Serious concerns have been raised relating to the scope, planning, budgeting, and practical value to patients of the initiative. Similar issues have also emerged during a recent health systems overhaul in Canada. Although concerning, these problems show that even without South Africa’s unique challenges, the task we face is daunting and we should be proud of what progress we are already making.

Another major theme looked into the quality and value of aggregated routine data obtained via the District Health Information System (DHIS). Caitlin Matson from Echo presented an excellent paper analysing the effectiveness of using aggregated DHIS data to evaluate the progress of a prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) trial. I found this presentation particularly interesting as Caitlin highlighted many of the challenges we have also faced in using Mobile Researcher for managing study logistics for PMTCT projects. One of the major challenges she mentioned was how patients move between Primary Health Care clinics, their Community Health Centre Maternity Obstetrics Unit (MOU), the local hospital MOU and the District MOU as they move through Diagnosis, antenatal care, delivery and postnatal care. In conclusion, it was stated that PMTCT, Anti-Retroviral (ARV), tuberculosis (TB) and other similar interventions require patient level data, from a cohort that are tracked over time, rather than routine (aggregated) system data in order to effectively evaluate progress.

We had put together a paper entitled “An Information System for Good Start III – The Role of Web and Mobile Technologies in a Randomised Control Study” which I presented during an ICT session on day two. I had fifteen minutes to summarise the Goodstart Management Console (GSMC) and how it integrates to Mobile Researcher. The GSMC was designed to assist the Medical Research Council with a complex PMTCT trial through leveraging Mobile Researcher as a data collection platform and providing scheduling and reporting tools for managing participants, community health workers and their intervention schedules. If you’d like to learn more about the GSMC, you can read the case study online.

Overall, I enjoyed my time at HISA and came home with some interesting ideas, having met some smart people making great progress with IT for the health industry in South Africa.

The conference starts tomorrow, 19 August at Emperor’s Palace in Johannesburg and continues till Friday with workshops having started yesterday and today.

We’ve been involved in a number of projects where Mobile Researcher has been used for project M&E and have also worked closely with organisations such as the MRC, Stellenbosch University and Philani to build custom web-based management consoles (leveraging the Mobile Researcher API) which include M&E elements. We’re also in the early stages of projects with specialist M&E agencies like Khulisa.

I’ll be at SAMEA demonstrating and exhibiting Mobile Researcher and how it can be leveraged, either out-the-box, or as a platform, to incorporate mobile technologies as a powerful monitoring and evaluation tool.

If you are attending the conference, please drop by or ping me on Twitter if you’d like to meet up.

I must say that I hadn’t heard of SAFIPA, which stands for South Africa – Finland Knowledge Partnership on ICT, until earlier this year. It’s essentially a bilateral project between the two governments with the view to foster the local ICT industry.

A common theme at this year’s conference was the triple-helix concept – where government, private sector and academia collaborate closely on a particular project. Also new to me was the Living Lab term which is where a community participates directly in and assumes joint ownership of a research initiative, usually underpinned by ICT (see Wikipedia for more). One of my favourite sessions was presented by Marlon Parker on the Athlone Living Lab (ALL) where he, with support from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the local community are using MXit and other instant messaging systems to provide drug advice support, debt support and other social counseling services.

I was pleased to be asked, along with several other entrepreneurs, to present in an “elevator pitch” session to a mock investor panel. Much to my delight, my pitch on Mobile Researcher won and SAFIPA kindly rewarded me with a brand new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone – a significant upgrade from my previous handset. Many thanks!

I really found the conference to be a great learning and networking experience. Looking forward to next year.

The presentation will highlight the methodologies, strategies and technologies utilised in the design of the Good Start Management Console (GSMC). The GSMC is a web-based system which was built to leverage the Mobile Researcher Application Programming Interface (API) to allow the activities involved in a large-scale randomised control trial to be closely managed and monitored. Community Health Workers (CHWs) make use of low end mobile phones and complete simple surveys which are fed back directly to the GSMC.

Mark will be presenting the paper as I will be overseas, so if you’re in Johannesburg during those dates and are interested in health informatics, be sure to register – the conference is sure to have a number of insightful speakers and perspectives.

If you’d like to learn more about the GSMC, the case study is a good place to start.

This is the first international conference which focuses on the topic – most previous conferences only including a mobile component.  Although I heard about it too late to submit anything to present, it was great to hear about the activities that other organisations are up to and meet folks from around the world working in the space.

Most of the conferences I usually attend are development or health focused, simply as a result of the number of projects we work on with NGOs and organisations which operate in these sectors.  It was interesting to concentrate purely on the market research and commercial applications for a few days.

More information can be found on the conference website.