Availability and Suitability of Digital Health Tools in Africa for Pandemic Control
Citation: Silenou BC, Nyirenda JLZ, Zaghloul A, et al. Availability and Suitability of Digital Health Tools in Africa for Pandemic Control: Scoping Review and Cluster Analysis. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance. 2021;7(12):e30106.
Language: Abstract and full-text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: The Regional Programme Support to Pandemic Prevention in the Economic Community of West African States Region implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (project number 14.2510.7-005.00) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union.
What is this? The development of mobile health (mHealth) surveillance tools to alleviate the challenges faced by the paper-based Integrated Disease Surveillance Response has resulted in a large variety of tools in the field. In this scoping review, the authors searched for articles to map and identify commonalities among mHealth tools used for surveillance or outbreak management of communicable diseases in Africa. They restricted their searches to articles published between 1 January 2010 and 24 December 2020. The literature search and subsequent mapping of the tools spanned from November 2020 to January 2021. They included 1,914 publications reporting on 30 different mHealth tools.
What was found? There is a large range of mHealth surveillance tools in use. Most of them do not offer a comprehensive set of attributes, resulting in the need for public health workers to use multiple mHealth tools in parallel. Only 13% (4/30) of the tools cover most of the attributes, including those most relevant for response to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as laboratory interface, contact follow-up, and transmission network visualization.
Implications: The authors stated that the findings of this study can support public health institutions in choosing the most appropriate tools, or assist developers in including relevant attributes into future tools. The mHealth programs will be sustained by improving internet connectivity, integration between tools or apps, supervision to ensure data quality, and measures for the sustainable use of tools.
Other considerations: The authors of the review did not discuss their findings in the context of issues relating to health equity.
This summary was prepared by Eszter Szocs, checked by Sneha Bhadti, and finalized by Helen Worthington.