On Friday the 23rd of November the Dutch national congress on STIs, HIV and sex takes place in Amsterdam. The theme of this year’s congress is “Together to a breakthrough”. An important question to be answered will be how to reach the most hard to reach target groups and how to involve communities and new (communication) technologies and data in doing so.
Health[e]Foundation will be hosting a workshop called ‘Supporting the last mile with digital efforts’ on our experiences with the digitization within health care. The digitization within healthcare is a fact and worldwide innovations follow each other rapidly. The digitization process is both promising and challenging.
Health[e]Foundation responds to the need of improved accessibility to health information and care, especially in the area of maternal and childcare, by developing the smartphone application MyHealth@Hand. MyHealth@Hand is a self-management tool for pregnant woman. The app enables women to store and access their personal health data, find personalized information about how to stay healthy during and after their pregnancy and stimulates efficient communication with their healthcare providers. In June the clickable prototype of the app, which has been developed in close collaboration with our partners from Finland (Industry62) and Estonia (Elagem) was tested with the prospective user groups: pregnant women and healthcare providers. Currently we are working hard to have the first pilot version of the app ready to be tested in January 2019. The difference between the previous test and this test will be that instead of only showing the app to women and healthcare providers, we will now ask the them to actually use MyHealth@Hand for a longer period of time and follow them throughout to learn how they use and like the app.
During the workshop we will discuss how MyHealth@Hand can be used to inform communities, with a specific focus on pregnant women and mothers, about safe sex, prevention of STIs and the health of mother and child. The app is one of many digital initiatives around the world, in this workshop we will focus on the challenges and solutions of digitization within healthcare as experienced by the workshop participants. Together we will discuss the added value of digital initiatives in healthcare: how to reach vulnerable groups, the implementation challenges and how the solutions can be integrated into existing health systems.
We invite you to join us at the workshop. Subscribe here!