MVTK APP

Ministry of Health and Population:

Mobile Village Toolkit App

Welcome

The Mobile Village Toolkit (MVTK) application was developed to support Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) in healthcare data collection, and programmatic area decisions. The application was developed by Dimagi Inc. which is part of the ONSE Health consortium. The main objective is to improve the healthcare system of hard-to-reach villages in Malawi.

This website serves as an overview of the MVTK application with demos and training resources to equip the HSAs with all the information they require to utilize the MVTK application.

Our Approach

The MVTK was built using the latest Ministry of Health protocols. The MVTK application enforces referral protocol and follow-up visits. In the application a new visit cannot be started without checking the outcome of the previous visit – which closes the referral loop.

The MVTK application is built to support the following service areas:

Community Based Maternal and New-born Care (CBMNC)
Family Planning
Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM)
Stock Management
Monthly Reporting

The application was designed with the input from the HSAs. We conducted user-acceptance testing and extensive focus groups to gather user input on usability. The result is a user-friendly application that has been designed to suit user needs first.

We added extra features to improve HSAs day to day work such as:

Breath counter application – this enables a child’s breaths per minute to be easily recorded
Next Depo Provera due date calculator - to aid in working out when a woman is due for her next injection and helps to prevent an injection from being given before it is due
Training module which is accessible on the phone, this helps HSAs to refresh their memory when they are stuck.

Key Benefits

Indicators Tallied

Indicators will automatically tally , based on visit forms completed and services provided. This ensures data accuracy. Indicators from visit data and cannot be edited.

Stock Support

Stock deducted during visits and balance reflected. Stock levels can then be integrated and pushed to CStock.

Interoperability

We have planned system integration to ensure indicators are sent to DHIS2 regularly - currently in progress

Offline Data Collection

MVTK can work offline, HSAs can continue to see clients even without network. Users must sync regularly to submit these totals to the server, but at least during day to day work they are not held back by network constraints.

Impact

The future impact is strengthened health systems that makes informed decision based in data. When HSAs at ground level data can be analysed and understood closer to real time, changes can be made on the ground and ultimately, improve service-delivery.

For example, recent indicator analysis of October 2018 from MVTK data has shown that the average of children receiving both ORS and Zinc to treat diarrhea is 26.7%. Digging deeper into the data, which is possible with a robust and flexible system, it can be seen that it is due to Zinc stock-outs that the overall percentage is low. Children getting zinc at all is 27.8%, whilst children getting ORS at all is 70.1%. Therefore, the shortage of Zinc needs to be addressed more urgently than the shortage of ORS. Without the ability to dig into the data, the assumption could be made that most children are not receiving ORS, whilst this is not the full picture.

As more HSAs collect data using MVTK over time, trends can be analysed and any improvements tracked. By having the data collected digitally, and flowing holistically up the collection chain, efforts such as the Community Health Department indicator consolidation process can be better supported.

Report abuse