Health[e]Foundation is improving the accessibility of care by developing the mobile application: ‘MyHEALTH@HAND’. Patients will be able to use this app to store all of their medical information on their own smartphones. They will have continual access to this information, whenever and wherever they are.
In 2017, Health[e]Foundation, in collaboration with e-health expert ELAGEM (Estonia) and app developer Industry62 (Finland), started the MyHEALTH@HAND project aiming to reduce mother and child mortality and morbidity. MyHEALTH@HAND is a selfmanagement app for pregnant women and healthcare workers that contains information on pregnancy, delivery and newborn care as well as medical data of the mothers and their families. Women have access to a learning center with information on a healthy lifestyle, pregnancy and newborn care. Relevant, personalized advise will be offered about antenatal care, healthy nutrition and exercise during pregnancy, fetus development, breastfeeding, growth and development of the child, danger signs etc. depending on the stage of the pregnancy and/or age of the newborn. The app also offers interactive features such as a mood tracker, contraction counter, a health bot and live chat options with healthcare workers. Additionally, women have ownership over and access to their personal health data, such as information about their medical history, previous pregnancies, physical examinations, laboratory tests etc. Healthcare workers have their own account which provides them with an overview of medical data of all the women in their care. A woman visiting a healthcare worker for the first time will grant him/her access to her data. From that moment onwards the healthcare worker can add data to the woman’s account.
The next step
Mid-June we are ready for the next step in the development of the app! Together with the Joep Lange Institute and PharmAccess International we will test the clickable prototype with 20 pregnant women/mothers and 20 healthcare providers in Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana. Testing the prototype and capturing the feedback of women and healthcare providers on how they see (or do not see) their expectations reflected in the app will help us to develop the app into a minimum viable product (MVP) (or a very first version in lay terms). We plan to conduct the pilot with the MVP in the last quarter of 2018. Exciting times!
