250148 “Make It Your Own”: Digital Tools to support CHWs

Monday, October 31, 2011

Sarah Shannon , Executive Director, Hesperian Health Guides, Berkeley, CA
Background: While technology promises to revolutionize CHWs' access to information, how to use technology to facilitate the adaptation of health content remains a question. As a developer and distributor of accessible, trusted health materials (in 88 languages and used in 90% of the world's countries), Hesperian is in a unique position to test how digital tools can assist in making health content appropriate and contextualized to local conditions, and support CHWs to “repackage” materials.

Objective/Purpose: How technology can effectively support the localization of health content by community health workers (CHWs) globally.

Methods: Between April 2010 and April 2011, Hesperian piloted a wiki-based ‘adaptation' tool for CHWs to localize vetted content from Hesperian's health content library. We partnered with AMDV in Honduras, to field-test with 20 CHWs (novice computer users). The CHWs tested the tool and library in multiple iterations, and through data from interviews, video, and in-person observation, we have analyzed and refined them.

Research is assessing how CHWs unfamiliar with computers and with varying degrees of health communications experience can find information in the Hesperian content library, and what challenges and successes they experience in localizing health materials and using templates for health messaging

Results: Preliminary findings include: CHWs strongly prefer topic lists over search; even CHWs who have never used a word processor prefer an interface similar to Microsoft Word; limited options and strong template structures increase use and adoption of the tool; health information adapted by CHWs to local realities is more effective in going the “last mile” to reach communities.

Discussion/Conclusions: The results of our findings are allowing us to refine the tool to better support CHWs in developing effective, localized health messages, and will be informative for all organizations trying to provide effective digital health content to CHWs.

Learning Areas:
Communication and informatics
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Provision of health care to the public
Public health or related education

Learning Objectives:
1. Describe the role that technology can play in facilitating the adaptation and localization of health information. 2. Assess the ability of a wiki-based ‘adaptation’ tool to support localization of vetted health material by CHWs. 3. Analyze the involvement of CHWs in creating a low-literacy web-based tools that reflect community needs.

Keywords: Community Health Promoters, Information Technology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I oversaw this research project as Executive Director, and was involved in planning it
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

See more of: Mobile and Web-Based Tools in HIT
See more of: Health Informatics Information Technology