Courtesy of our friends at John Snow, Inc: a terrific case report about using EpiSurveyor for the President's Malaria Initiative in Zambia. Favorite quotes:

"The use of the mobile phones in data collection should be encouraged in future. This will make data gathering, analysis and result generation quicker and done in near real time."

Last week DataDyne, represented by me,  and JSI (Ethiopia team) got to work together in a project in Ethiopia. The purpose for DataDyne visit was:

• Support JSI during their current project.
• DataDyne to have a fill of what actually happens in a field survey and learn from the experience.
• Take note of any problems/issues experienced while using EpiSurveyor

From the visit, we were able to experience some of the problems that users experience on the field. Some of the major problems were:

In the past few weeks, EpiSurveyor Mobile was used in Ghana in a recurring USAID and PMI (President's Malaria Initiative) activity to calculate critical indicators that are commonly used in PMI decisions.  Ghana is one of the 18 countries that conducts this quarterly activity.  The pilot team, led by John Snow Inc., tested EpiSurveyor Mobile against the pen-and-paper method at various health facilities in Western Ghana.

This week, our partners at John Snow, Inc (JSI) and Management Sciences for Health (MSH) are using EpiSurveyor Mobile Version 1.0 (released last week) for their PMI End-Use Malaria Monitoring Activity (EMMA).