Marco Antonio Gutierrez, Marina de Sa Rebelo, Jo�£o Henrique de Sa and Alexandra Brentani
University of Sao Paulo Medical School, Brazil
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Primary Health Care
Mobile health consists in the application of mobile devices and communication capabilities for expanding the coverage and improving the effectiveness of health care programs. This technology is particularly promising for developing countries, in which health authorities can take advantage of the flourishing mobile market to bring adequate health care to underprivileged communities, helping them to effectively combat long-living diseases not so often encountered in developed countries. In Brazil, the Primary Care Information System (SIAB) concentrates basic healthcare information from all different regions. The information is collected by primary care teams (PCT) on a paper-based procedure that degrades the quality of information provided to the healthcare authorities and slows down the process of decision making. To overcome these problems, we propose a secure data gathering application based on mobile devices connected to a 3G network and GPS for georeferenced purposes. The system is being used by PCT during regular visits to the underprivileged families in metropolitan area (> 400.000 inhabitants) of the country. A set of georeferenced data related to many aspects of the families is collected, such as house type, sanitation, total of family members, chronic diseases, vaccines, pregnancy, among others. The results obtained have shown that the proposed process is an alternative for data collecting, both in terms of data quality and lower deployment time. Additionally, the results obtained can also motivate changes in the existing forms, such as inclusion of relevant data as a way to enforce standardized inputs for the population supported by this mobile health solution.
Email: marco.gutierrez@incor.usp.br
