Texting in Healthcare - Malawi Style (Jopsa)

http://www.jopsa.org/?p=59 Check out the symptom tag cloud, resultant pie charts/graphs, and the fact that this research was done for St. Gabriel's Hospital for a project called Mobiles in Malawi. From Josh's site: "What’s everyone texting about? A few, very committed individuals - my mother and sister - set out to answer that question. My mom, Casey Nesbit (DPT), receives every message that is sent to the hospital, via email (thanks to a simple forwarding command in FrontlineSMS). Those messages are in Chichewa. For four months, she translated every message to English. My sister, Elizabeth Nesbit, decided to code and organize every SMS sent by the CHWs. She’s a sophomore at Rice University, making her way to medical school. She categorized messages by keywords and/or phrases (e.g. symptoms, supplies, patient updates/referrals, deaths, requests for help, requests for visits, meeting coordination). Under this introduction is a list of all the symptoms found in messages communicated to the hospital. Elizabeth sorted these symptoms out into categories (body pains, digestive and urinary tract, respiratory tract, swelling, skin and sores, malaria and fever, weakness, heart problems, cancer, and other). She broke apart every incoming message this way. Below the symptom list, you’ll find the fruit of their combined efforts - charts explaining the subject matter of texts to the hospital. Click on any of the charts to view a larger version. These messages fell between mid-August and early December. Shoot me an email if you want to see more of Elizabeth’s analysis." This is how healthcare gets done right. Congrats Josh on an excellent project - looking forward to following Jopsa for outcomes data.

Posted via email from Jen's posterous