Mobiles Malawi

Article

St Gabriel’s Hospital in rural Namitete, Malawi, serves 250,000 people across a catchment area a hundred miles wide with just two doctors, relying heavily on over 600 volunteer Community Health Workers to monitor drug adherence, trace patients and support home-based care. In 2008, Stanford student Josh Nesbit introduced FrontlineSMS, the text-messaging software built by Ken Banks at kiwanja.net, to connect these volunteers with the hospital by SMS for the first time, letting them report on patients’ TB and HIV treatment, flag people who needed tracing, coordinate support group meetings and prepare communities for mobile testing and immunisation visits, with the pilot programme securing extra ARV medication and reporting a death within its first hours of use.