CHIIN

Community health workers (CHWs) play a crucial role in sustaining health systems in Africa, as the first point of entry to the health system for millions of Africans in rural and underdeveloped areas. CHWs are trained members of the community that hold responsibilities such as performing health screenings, immunizations, primary infectious disease management, patient education, pre- and post-partum care, and more.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of ensuring that these frontline workers are adequately trained and equipped with accurate medical reference information to guide their interactions with patients in the community. But while access to medical references among health workers has been shown to improve outcomes, on-demand access to medical references for CHWs is limited due to poor internet usage penetration on the continent.

SIM and internet penetration in Africa by 2025. Source: Global System for Mobile Communications Association (2019)

Our team synthesizes materials from well-respected online medical reference sources (e.g. Mayo Clinic disease guides, CDC and WHO) into digestible text messages to be sent to offline community health workers. Users register and interact with a SMS chatbot powered by Twilio, a cloud communications platform that enables developers to programmatically make and receive text messages.

We parse the disease information into four key categories - causes, presentation, management, and complications - and store it via Cloud Firestore, a cloud-hosted NoSQL database, which the chatbot will interact with when a user makes an information request. The disease database will be specifically expanded based on direction from private and public clinical collaborators, who will also serve as an accredited source for validation.