Mobile Helping Babies Breathe
Background
Over the past decade, mobile phone ownership, and access to cellular networks have surged around the world, including low/middle-income countries. Acceptance of, and access to, a wide variety of digital health interventions has also skyrocketed among a wide range of stakeholders, including healthcare providers. Implementation of mHealth and digital tools in LMICs have been demonstrated to have numerous benefits, including improving access to care for patients, increasing knowledge retention and competencies among community health workers, and improving training outcomes, confidence/satisfaction, and reporting of key indicators among health providers.
From 2010 to present, a coalition of public-private partners spearheaded the development, evaluation, dissemination, and scale-up of a set of integrated, evidence-based maternal-newborn care initiatives called Helping Mothers Survive (HMS) and Helping Babies Survive (HBS) The purpose of these programs, which have been rolled out around the world, is to provide education and training for LMIC healthcare workers in evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Combined, the HMS and HBS programs address the leading causes of preventable maternal and neonatal mortality.
Innovation
There are currently 4 mobile applications, in various stages of design, development, evaluation, and deployment, within the award-winning mHBS/DHIS2 suite of digital tools. These include: mHBS/DHIS2 Tracker (data collection); mHBS/DHIS2 Trainer (educational and training materials); Essential Care for Every Baby Digital Action Plan (clinical decision support); NeoRoo (data collection, education, and automated monitoring of neonatal vital signs among babies utilizing the NeoSMART biomedical device).
The most innovative feature of our mHBS/DHIS2 tools is the fact that they are all built directly within the DHIS2 Mobile platform. This allows for mHBS/DHIS2 applications to be utilized off-line. mHBS/DHIS2 is highly flexible and customizable and can be modified according to the specific needs of collaborative partners, to capture an almost infinite array of events, indicators, and outcomes.
Building mHBS within the DHIS2 platform harnesses the global power of a highly scaled, widely utilized, open-source Health Management Information System. Many of the LMICs which have adopted DHIS2 on a national scale is the same areas in which Helping Babies Survive has also been widely disseminated. DHIS2 integrates with open-source electronic health record solutions, such as OpenMRS, potentially providing integrated coverage, via the use of mHBS/DHIS2 tools, for data collection and reporting from the individual patient or healthcare provider level to aggregated information at the health facility, regional, national, and international levels.
mHBS/DHIS2 applications are GDPR compliant
Citation: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/146/Supplement_2/S165
Impact on Human Health
The mHBS/DHIS2 suite of mobile applications is built to support improved dissemination and implementation of Helping Babies Survive and related newborn care programs. Helping Babies Survive programs, in particular, the Helping Babies Breathe initiative, has been shown to significantly reduce rates of fresh stillbirth and neonatal mortality, when implemented at scale. An overarching objective that aligns existing global efforts among maternal-newborn-child health partners, including the NeoInnovate Collaborative Consortium, is to collectively achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDG target for neonatal mortality is for each country to reduce their neonatal mortality rate (NMR) to only 12 per every 1000 liveborn babies. This is an ambitious goal to meet, as many regions still have much, much higher NMRs. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread disruptions to local health systems, and global supply chains, further exacerbates this challenge. Through technical and collaborative support for initiatives such as the Every Newborn Action Plan and the WHO Quality, Equity, Dignity Network, and alignment of mHBS/DHIS2 tools to support the aims and objectives of these and other SDG partners, the NeoInnovate Collaborative Consortium strives to make a substantive contribution toward the reduction of neonatal mortality.
Additional Content
To learn more about the mobile Helping Babies Breathe powered by the DHIS2 app (mHBS/DHIS2), please see this video.
ECEB app Showcase at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition (October 5, 2020): The ECEB app was one of only 5 research abstracts selected for Oral Presentation at a special session for the 10-year anniversary of Helping Babies Breathe, sponsored by the AAP Section on Global Health and Helping Babies Survive. https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/ECEB+app+Showcase+by+Sherri+Bucher+At+AAP/1_1007gz4x
Essential Care for Every Baby app awarded first place in the American Medical Informatics Association Student Design Challenge (2019): https://soic.iupui.edu/news/students-newborn-app-amia/
Learn how Dr. Bucher and colleagues have spent a decade saving newborn lives through Helping Babies Breathe: https://indianactsi.org/news_/celebrating-ten-years-of-helping-babies-breathe-2/
Gallery
