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Towards an Integrated mHealth Platform for Community-based Maternity Health Workers in Low-Income Communities

Published: 21 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

A variety of actors with diverse perspectives such as maternity health workers (MHWs), pregnant women, providers and other community organizations constitute the perinatal services system designed for low-income communities. Yet, little is known about the nature of service delivery challenges that seem inevitable in this setting. We sought to understand prenatal services system from the perspective of MHWs and identify areas that can be improved by mHealth solutions. We collected qualitative data from twenty-eight target MHWs via an online survey, and used the open coding approach to identify themes. The findings showed that MHWs face a number of challenges while providing services like education, referrals etc. Notable challenges were lack of coordination with other stakeholders, unmet professional development needs, maintaining privacy and difficulties with client education, communication and record exchange. MHWs expressed the need for innovative technologies to facilitate client education and open communication with other maternity health actors. Our findings suggest that there is a great demand for communication and service delivery tools in community-based MHWs. But, new solution need to be integrated within existing tools and environment while empowering MHWs with professional and educational support.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    PervasiveHealth '18: Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
    May 2018
    413 pages
    ISBN:9781450364508
    DOI:10.1145/3240925
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 21 May 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. care coordination
    2. communication
    3. community-based
    4. design
    5. low socioeconomic
    6. maternity health workers
    7. pregnancy

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    • (2022)From Self-Tracking to Sleep-HackingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556306:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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