MSH presented today at a meeting of the Hopkins-affiliated mHealth Working Group.  I wasn't able to attend, but was glad to see the slides posted by the working group: nice overview of an EpiSurveyor implementation in Malawi for monitoring malaria drug supplies (the project report was described in this previous blog entry).

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."

Today Yusuf Ibrahim (in photo, with staff from HealthBridge and Canadian Red Cross watching in the back) and I demonstrated EpiSurveyor on both PDAs and mobile phones to Dr. Iyam Ugot and his colleague Mr. Ndem A. Ndiyo. Dr. Ugot is a Special Advisor to the Nigerian government for the Roll Back Malaria program, and Mr. Ndiyo is an economic advisor to the government. Both expressed great interest in using EpiSurveyor on mobiles for ongoing work, which would be great.  Both indicated frustration with paper-based survey methods, and the long delays with getting data entered from paper.

Representatives of Canadian Red Cross, DataDyne, and HealthBridge met for a series of strategic meetings at the Axari Hotel in Calabar, Nigeria. This week there will be a PDA-based survey done using EpiSurveyor to determine the coverage rate of insecticide treated bednets among children less than five years old and pregnant women.  The group as a whole was eager to proceed, as evidenced by the photos attached.