Mobile interactive messaging system for patients’ in collaboration with health workers

Abstract

Health issues in developing countries are becoming more serious day by day, as different diseases attack and infect people making the public health sector overwhelmed. This has made it difficult for health workers to accurately study the trend of different diseases in many cases, thus failing to analyze the way patients behave after being diagnosed. The number of people who possess mobile phones is increasing every year and this can help facilitate communication in different geographical locations that may hinder movement of the health workers. The initiative to introduce the use of interactive messaging system is for patients who wish to access health services such as doctoral appointments and consultations or need monitoring but are faced by challenges like; the time needed to make for appointments and consultations, patients monitoring and halving to travel for long distances to reach the facility. Therefore the researcher designed and prototyped a mobile interactive messaging system that would enable patients to send their preliminary symptoms to the health workers in Kenyan public hospitals via SMS through mobile phones. With regard to the wide spread usage of mobile telephony today, the researcher chose to use the technology since she anticipated it would reach a large population. An interactive messaging system for patients’ collaboration with health workers is a system that uses mobile phone technology that enables communication between patients and health workers. This system’ will serve both the new and continuing patients. The health workers will monitor the progress of continuing patients, while the new patients send their preliminary symptoms to the health workers via SMS. All this information is stored in database residing at the health facility, which will serve as a reference point to the health workers as they respond to the messages received and patients will be able to effectively collaborate with the health workers without necessarily having to visit health facility.