Effectiveness of an intergrated m-health platform for malaria control : case study of Bindura, Zimbabwe

Many countries signed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which need to be achieved by 2015.The MDGs touch on health among other things and it has been noted that developing countries, including Zimbabwe, are lagging behind in their efforts to reach these goals by 2015 with several challenges being noted as undermining efforts to reach the goals. Several countries, in almost all continents are implementing m-health to help complement traditional efforts in many sectors of health delivery. This research was made to assess the effectiveness of an internet enabled mobile phone as a data collection and reporting tool in the fight against malaria. The research was carried out on twenty health workers in and around Bindura , in Mashonaland Central. Health workers collected data on malaria cases and sent them on a password protected website using smart phones which they used to send details on every case that they received and also received messages and could also send messages via the platform. The mobile website was also tested for response time, availability and speed among other factors and together with the users responses it was concluded that a smart phone is a very powerful tool that can be used to improve malaria control in the data collection and monitoring. The author had several recommendations from the lessons learnt during the research which if implemented, will help in the realisation of the full potential of the mobile phone as a reporting tool