Keep it simple: designing a user-centred digital information system to support chronic disease management in low/middle-income countries

Objective Implement a user-centred digital health information system to facilitate rapidly and substantially increasing the number of patients treated for hypertension in low/middle-income countries.Methods User-centred design of Simple, an offline-first app for mobile devices to record patient clin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Andrew E Moran, Thomas R Frieden, Jennifer Cohn, Daniel Burka, Reena Gupta, Sohel R Choudhury, Tim Cheadle, Rahul Mullick
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMJ Publishing Group 2023-12-01
Series:BMJ Health & Care Informatics
Online Access:https://informatics.bmj.com/content/30/1/e100641.full
Description
Summary:Objective Implement a user-centred digital health information system to facilitate rapidly and substantially increasing the number of patients treated for hypertension in low/middle-income countries.Methods User-centred design of Simple, an offline-first app for mobile devices to record patient clinical visits and a web-based dashboard to monitor programme performance.Results The Simple mobile application scaled rapidly over the past 4 years to reach more than 11 400 primary care facilities in four countries with over 3 million patients enrolled. Simple achieved median duration for new patient registration of 76 s (IQR 2 s) and follow-up visit entry of 13 s (IQR 1 s).Conclusions A fast, easy-to-use digital information system for hypertension programmes that accommodates healthcare worker time constraints by minimising data entry and focusing on key performance indicators can successfully reach scale in low-resource settings.
ISSN:2632-1009