Mobile technology and community health workers (evidence up to June 2012)
Citation: Braun R, Catalani C, Wimbush J, et al. Community health workers and mobile technology: a systematic review of the literature. PloS one. 2013;8(6):e65772.
What is this? The COVID-19 pandemic is placing a strain on healthcare systems and workers. Existing research on the use of mobile health (mHealth) by community health workers in low-resource settings might provide useful information for policy makers.
In this systematic review, the authors searched for articles that looked at community health workers and their use of mobile technology for the delivery of health services. They restricted the search to articles published in English after 1999 and did the search in June 2012. They included 25 articles encompassing 28 studies, which were mostly conducted in Africa and Asia, with a few in Latin America.
What was found: At the time of this review, community health workers were using mHealth tools with increasing effectiveness to improve the delivery of maternal and child health, HIV and other sexual and reproductive health services, and other general health services in low resource settings, mainly in Africa.
At the time of this review, the cost effectiveness of national implementations of the use of mobile technology by community health workers was uncertain.
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