Enhancing Community Based Health Information System (CBHIS) Reporting Through Open-Source Short Message Service-Based Tool

Evidence-based strategic decisions, planning, budgeting, policy formulation at different health care levels can be made possible with complete, accurate, timely health information. However, manual reporting forms continues to increase frequency of errors and workload of community health volunteers (CHVs). Mobile penetration rate standing at 79.2% in Kenya has been seen as a potential technology avenue to improve current CBHIS process flows. We thus designed and piloted a simple SMS-Based reporting system for the CHVs and assessed its impact to improve timeliness in reporting, arithmetic accuracy, data completeness, cost in Kinamba Community Unit. The system helped reduce annual transport cost by 97%, over 3 days' time saving collating the data, improved CHVs reporting rate by 16% for 3-month period, eliminate inaccurate manual aggregation according to the 94% users in agreement. This research therefore recommends self-sustaining open source technologies for efficient and easy data collection, transmission and analysis systems for quicker response.