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

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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Experimentation

Keywords:
automation, child health, imci, pda, tanzania