In 2009, global health care provider AMPATH began deploying community health workers in rural villages and communities in Western Kenya as part of a home-based HIV/AIDS counseling and testing program.
Armed with a bag of testing and counseling supplies and a smartphone with a GPS and AMPATH’s electronic medical record system, the community health workers travel by foot door-to-door assuring that every person over the age of 13 and every at-risk child was tested for HIV.
AMPATH’s smartphone-based data collection capabilities are based on Open Data Kit (ODK), a joint project of UW CSE and Google. “The ability to collect data in electronic form and integrate it with the rest of the system is the most important tool we have to successfully implement the pHCT program,” said Martin Were, Chief Medical Information Officer for the AMPATH Consortium. “Open Data Kit has been instrumental in this data collection.”
This week, the pHCT program reached its one millionth person, using ODK.