Background and Purpose
Background
Healthcare Providers in India
In India, there is an average of 1 healthcare provider for every 2000 patients. This is twice as many patients as the World Health Organization standard, which calls for 1 health provider for 1000. Other countries, such as the United States and Cuba, with ratios of 1 to 300 and 1 to 165 respectively, have drastically lower ratios. This is not even continue the discrepancies of the urban and rural areas, where certain rural areas can have up to 40,000 patients per healthcare provider.
Importance Community Health Workers
Therefore, community health workers are vital in the connection between patients and the necessary medical knowledge and treatment. While the draw of becoming a doctor is decreasing, the ease of becoming a CHW is actually increasing. However, though there are more volunteers, these are individuals whose enthusiasm overcomes the fact that some are not literate or, though trained, will have little background to tackle some of the complex issues they are presented on a daily basis.
Importance of Technology
Technology has the ability to bridge the gap in communication, linking the community health workers with knowledge to help them excel at their job. Ultimately, this will even allow a link between the patients and the knowledge as well. Even with the connectivity issues aside, technology has the potential to scale and allow improvements in the health of patients even in the outskirts of the community.
Purpose
The Raxa EMR Community Health Worker Module looks to use technology to tackle these problems that are faced by CHWs:
Organization of Patients
CHWs generally have to carry around large ledger books and record information by hand. This is physically straining to carry all the books so sometimes they will leave them at home, memorizing the information they need to input. It is difficult to transfer the information to the hospital. If the ledger is stolen or damaged, the information is gone. Therefore, it is important to create an electronic patient management system.
Structure and communication of visits
The visits CHWs conduct are based on personal understanding of which patients need to be visited and what types of tasks are to be done. This would not allow flexibility to change the schedule for individuals with more extreme illnesses or who need follow ups. Doing too many or too few tasks that are not tailored to the specific family or patient case create inefficiency. Pure reliance on memory can lead to inadvertent mistakes. This is important to create a scheduling and task distribution system.
Inventory of current supplies
Currently, CHWs keep track of inventory on pencil and paper for themselves and for the hospital. This information is difficult to transfer from one place to another, especially because handwritten message can be poorly interpreted. Drug orders must be synced with the hospital laboratory.
Resources for education
As one of the roles of the CHWs is to spread knowledge about preventative care. It is difficult for CHWs to spread knowledge without trust, even though the information they are giving can save lives. By implementing stored resources for both the patients and the CHWs, information will be not only informative but also authoritative. This can help increase trust in the CHW and also more effectively transmit important information.