Challenge
Frontline healthcare workers in developing countries often lack the technology and internet access to efficiently collect health data, track patients, and share information. This makes it harder to support pregnant women and newborn babies, promote good health and manage disease. Pandemics like Ebola and COVID-19 present an urgent need for technology to collect data and contact trace in real time.
Solution and Impact
Financing is helping Dimagi Inc., a small technology business based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, support healthcare workers in South Africa with its open source mobile data management platform that facilitates data intake, patient monitoring, and COVID-19 contact tracing. The company’s technology allows healthcare workers to input data on individual patients, track their symptoms and healthcare visits and flag any areas of concern.
Since 2002, Dimagi’s technology has supported more than 500 projects in 64 countries. The technology has been used to strengthen rural health clinics, increase vaccine administration, and to conduct Ebola contact tracing in West Africa.
Dimagi recently launched a new pandemic division and is using its digital technology to improve the speed and accuracy of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting and sharing data.
More than 600 organizations around the world, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institutes of Health, and Catholic Relief Services use Dimagi’s technology. It currently supports about 10 percent of community health workers globally. Dimagi built its technology to be flexible so that health workers can design their own apps and work offline when there is no internet access.