Participants in a group photograph
The Department of Biological Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences of the School of Public Health has organized a stakeholders meeting on the Electronic Health Information and Surveillance System Project (eHISS).
The project is aimed at ensuring that tailor-made health information is provided to sick individuals through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Individuals with mobile phones can therefore have access to information regarding their health or any ailment. This would most especially enable illiterate individuals to obtain valuable actual health information with the use of their mobile phones.At the same time the number and type of health requests from a distinct area will allow for the derivation of continues data on fluctuations of health parameters and to display real-time spatio-temporal developments on a disease map. The approach will enable an automated real-time syndrome-specific surveillance and early alerting system.
The stakeholders who attended the workshop included representatives from mobile telephone company, MTN, Ghana Health Service, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Communication, Hope for Future Generations, an NGO as well as faculty members from the School of Public Health, who formed the eHISS research team, together with the project coordinator and Prof. Julius Fobil, Head of the Department of Biological Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (BEOHS).
Prof. Fobil, Head of the Department of Biological Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (BEOHS) demonstrating the process with a mobile phone
Prof. Julius Fobil demonstrated to the stakeholders, how to subscribe to the electronic health service with their mobile phones and receive an interactive voice messages with information about their health. The stakeholders later discussed the pros and cons of the service and highlighted the need for the service to be in various local languages to enable it to be utilized well.
The project aims to establish a proof-of-concept on mobile-phone based electronic health information and surveillance system (eHISS) in sub-Saharan Africa as well as implement a pilot and evaluation. If the pilot project successful, the data received can be used for health summary statistics, outbreak alerts as well as planning of public health interventions and scientific studies.
