Mobile health app makes a difference in sub-Saharan Africa

Last year, EpiSurveyor training took place in nine countries (Benin, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal and Uganda). This year, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Eritrea, Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania and Togo will have training programs.

Overall, the collaboration has helped train more than 800 health officers throughout Africa on how to use the EpiSurveyor program.

The application is open source, allowing countries to download the source code and customize it to their language of choice.

"The application will soon incorporate Global Position[ing] System, which will allow the servers to automatically detect the location of the research immediately [as] the reports are sent," said Selanikio.

"It is very easy to monitor the data online than when we conducted immunization campaigns on paper. We can monitor the returned forms from the field and detect problems as soon as they arise," said Bernard Wambu, program officer, Division of Child and Adolescent Health, Ministry of Health.