The Added Value of a Mobile Application of Community Case Management on Pediatric Referral Rates in Malawi

Summary

Community Case Management (CCM) is a clinical decision aid used by frontline Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) in Malawi to manage uncomplicated cases of pneumonia and malaria (amongst other conditions). Children identified has having complicated illness are urgently referred to larger health facilities better equipped to clinically manage these more complex presentations. There is evidence to suggest HSAs are missing opportunities to refer seriously ill children, and parents/caregivers are failing to comply with urgent referral recommendations when given; reducing the overall effectiveness of the CCM strategy. Use of mobile technology for deploying CCM has been demonstrated in prior research as feasible to evaluate, acceptable to health workers and parents/caregivers and improving health worker fidelity to the guidelines, but it is unknown if this translates into increased referral and referral completion rates. This trial seeks to evaluate the added value of a purpose developed mobile solution for CCM, called Supporting LIFE electronic Community Case Management (SL eCCM App) on HSA referral and parent/caregiver health seeking behavior.

Conditions

• Infectious Diseases

Interventions

OTHER

Supporting LIFE electronic Community Case Management

The SL eCCM App is smartphone application developed to run on Android operating systems 3.0 Honeycomb and above. The SL eCCM App represents an electronic format of the WHO and UNICEFs paper-based CCM clinical decision rule, currently adopted as national policy in Malawi for assessing children presenting to village clinics with acute illness.The App includes a tap-sensitive breath counter for measuring breathing rate.

OTHER

Standard care

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Imperial College London

  collaborator OTHER

• University College Cork

  collaborator OTHER

• Lund University

  collaborator OTHER

• Mzuzu University

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Luke International Norway

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University of Washington

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Matthew J Thompson, DPhil · University of Washington

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

DIAGNOSTIC

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

2 Months

Max Age

59 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-10-31

Primary Completion

2017-02-28

Completion

2017-02-28