Completing the Trifecta

The Partners in Health consultant team presenting their application to improve obstetric care in Chiapas Mexico.

The following blog post was written by Dr. James Wolff, an Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH). For the past three years, Dr. Wolff has co-taught a course called “Improving Health Outcomes Using Mobile Technologies.” 

As part of our expanding partnership, between Dimagi and Boston University School of Public Health’s Course Using Mobile Technologies to Improve Health Outcomes, Dimagi graciously hosted the Fourth Annual Mobile Health Showcase event at Dimagi’s office on May 4^th, 2016. Like a great horserace, it was an electrifying evening that brought together students, faculty and alumni from BUSPH, the technical staff at Dimagi, and the public interested in using mobile health for public health.

Before the start of the formal presentations the audience and presenters had a chance to network over drinks and some excellent hors oeuvres. John Jackson and Neal Lesh from Dimagi were there to greet the showcase attendees.

Jon Payne, one of the three course instructors, opened the event with a short description of the objectives of the course and briefly described how the students worked with their clients to develop mobile applications. This year six organizations participated in the course.

The team representing PharmAccess in Namibia kicked off the presentations with a mobile application for facilitating counseling and informed consent for voluntary male circumcision in Namibia. They were followed by the team that worked with Tufts University to develop a Commcare application to gather market data on essential foods in Ghana. The third presentation from the team representing Initiatives Inc., a local global health consulting company, presented an application to support CHW decision-making and counseling in Tanzania. The audience and participants then took a short break. When the presentations resumed the audience heard about an application developed with Village Reach to provide access to reproductive health information in Malawi using IVR. The next presentation developed with IntraHealth demonstrated how SMS technology could be used to link the community to health services information pulled from a database using SMS in Uganda. The final presentation of the night featured a Commcare application developed using the Better Birth Checklist from Ariadne Labs developed with Partner’s in Health to improve delivery of obstetric care in Chiapas Mexico.

The Annual Showcase was a great end to the semester and an amazing beginning to our evolving partnership.

The Conference room at Dimagi was at capacity.

Networking at Dimagi over some great hors oeuvres.