A Mobile Health Application for Tracking Patients' Health Record

Title: A Mobile Health Application for Tracking Patients' Health Record Abstract Background: Mobile Health (mHealth) has recently been adopted and used in rural communities in developing countries to improve the quality of healthcare in those areas. Some organizations use mHealth application to track pregnancy and provide routine checkups for pregnant women. Other organizations use mHelath application to provide treatment and counseling services to HIV/AIDs patients, and others are using it to provide treatment and other health care services to the general populations in rural communities. One organization that is using mobile health to bring primary care for the first time in some of the rural communities of Liberia is Last Mile Health. Since 2015, the organization has trained community health assistants (CHAs) to use a mobile health platform called Data Collection Tools (DCTs). The CHAs use the DCT to collect health data, diagnose and treat patients, provide counseling and educational services to their communities, and for referring patients for further care. While it is true that the DCT has many great features, it currently has many limitations such as data storage, data processing, and many others. Objectives: The goals of this study was to 1. Explore some of the mobile health initiatives in developing countries and outline some of the important features of those initiatives. 2. Design a mobile health application (a new version of the Last Mile Health's DCT) that incorporates some of those features that were outlined in objective 1. Method: A comprehensive literature search in PubMed and Arizona State University (ASU) Library databases was conducted to retrieve publications between 2014 and 2017 that contained phrases like "mHealth design", "mHealth implementation" or "mHealth validation". For a publication to refer to mHealth, the publication had to contain the term "mHealth," or contains both the term "health" and one of the following terms: mobile phone, cellular phone, mobile device, text message device, mobile technology, mobile telemedicine, mobile monitoring device, interactive voice response device, or disease management device. Results: The search yielded a total of 1407 publications. Of those, 11 publications met the inclusion criteria and were therefore included in the study. All of the features described in the selected articles were important to the Last Mile Health, but due to issues such as internet accessibility and cellular coverage, only five of those features were selected to be incorporated in the new version of the Last Mile's mobile health system. Using a software called Configure.it, the new version of the Last Mile's mobile health system was built. This new system incorporated features such as user logs, QR code, reminder, simple API, and other features that were identified in the study. The new system also helps to address problems such as data storage and processing that are currently faced by the Last Mile Health organization.