3 ways mobile helped stop the spread of Ebola in Nigeria

BROOKINGS TECH TANK   by Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West                                       March 19, 2015

...There were a variety of factors that contributed to Nigeria’s success at combating the (Ebola)  disease. One important factorwas the use of mobile electronic health records programs.

1. Training Healthcare Workers

Training health care providers was a priority at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak. A survey found that 85 percent of health care workers in the country believed you could avoid Ebola by abstaining from handshakes or touching. Correcting these myths about the disease was a critical part of the response effort, especially for health care workers.

2. Rapid Deployment

One of the virtues of mHealth is its speed and flexibility. Mobile allows officials to quickly disseminate the latest information to front line health care workers. Increasing the speed of communication is a general boon to any large public health response.

3. Virtual Records

Ebola Treatment Units (ETU) greatly benefitted from using digital rather than paper records. Paper records cannot be removed from an ETU. Deborah Theobald co-founder of Vecna Technologies that created the mHealth platform in Nigeria has pointed out that, “If the patient is isolated, so is their paperwork”. Electronic records are easy to share and also lower the risk of infection for health care workers.

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2015/03/19-ebola-nigeria-mhealth