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Monitorting and evaluation made easy

Staff Correspondent
PICTURE this: prompted by a notification on her cell phone, a health worker visits a patient in the local village for a scheduled check-up.
After the check-up, she gives the update of the patient's latest health condition to the field health worker who, sitting in front of a computer, updates the information and calls up the patient to ask some routine questions for feedback on the service.
All the information — the schedule of the visits, medical history of the patient as well as his or her feedback — are stored in the computer or in a server, from where it can be accessed in
real time.
Kimberly A Rook, a health and technology expert, gave the mock example how an entire health monitoring and evaluation system can work under a few simple steps using information and communication technology.
"This can be achieved by using software and computers. All of the technology is already available,” she said addressing a technical session at the colloquium yesterday.
The session titled "ICTs in monitoring and evaluation of healthcare services” was one of the three technical sessions in the second day of The Daily Star Leadership Colloquium 2012 ICT in Healthcare.
The Daily Star, Golden Harvest, Summit Group, Citi Bank and D.Net organised the two-day annual colloquium at The Daily Star Centre in the city from Friday.
In her keynote address, Kimberly A Rook said despite a lack of supporting evidence of ICT's impact on healthcare, the technology's influence in healthcare has garnered worldwide recognition.
It does not mean that ICT does
not work in healthcare monitoring and exultation, but only that there is not enough proof or evidence of the level of its impact.
“We need to vigorously work to find out what works and what doesn't, and expand upon the ones that do work,” she said.
Earlier, Kimberly gave examples of how ICT is being used in healthcare monitoring and evaluation through a number of projects.
The Bangladesh based Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) project, for one, provides essential heath information to pregnant women through cell phones.
The project, which is a spin-off of the US based Text 4 Baby initiative, has become immensely popular and several similar projects are being undertaken in other countries, said Kimberly.
The Strengthening Pharmaceutical Systems (SPS) project, on the other hand, deals with efficient and real time management of inventory of health supplies, she said.
While the project has ended, it has been so successful that the Directorate General of health services is about to adopt it for its health supplies management, she added.
For successful use of ICT in monitoring and evaluation of
healthcare, a country needs to have an alignment and commitment to a clear e-health vision, said Kimberly.
“In that respect, Bangladesh is a very good example has the country as the digital Bangladesh vision and an ICT policy,” she said.
The question is how to act on these visions and how to actually get there, she added.
According to Mridul Chowdhury, CEO and Founder of mPower Health, the world is more on the experimental phase when it comes to the use of ICT in healthcare monitoring and evaluation.
Chair of the session, Dr. Kaosar Afsana, associate Director of the Health Programme for BRAC, said there is a need for dialogue between different stakeholders in the matter so that they can share experiences and come up with solutions.
Other speakers in the session pointed different limitations of ICT in monitoring healthcare issues including lack of network coverage, quality of the collected data and enthusiasm of subscribers to participate in the service.
They suggested a wait-and-see approach to find which initiatives are effective and what are not, and to streamline the initiatives that work.