Motech

May 28, 2016

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Mobile Technology for Community Health Project

About

Grameen Foundation, based in Washington DC, was founded in 1997 to increase the access of poor people to microfinance in order to enable them to create a world without poverty. It brings a mix of financial services – loans, savings, insurance – to the rural poor and connects farmers to markets, helps them grow more high-value crops, and enables them to demand better prices. Dimagi, Inc. is a for-profit social enterprise based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that delivers open-source software technology suitable for low-resource settings and underserved communities. The company designs clinical interfaces, health information systems, and mobile technologies to perform patient-level disease management, clinical decision support, and health system monitoring. Both of these clients turned to us for our support in improving the living conditions in the Third World by means of work on the MOTECH platform.

Challenge

The MOTECH Platform is an open-source software package that connects popular mHealth technologies in order to unlock new outcomes toward strengthening health systems. MOTECH was deployed across the globe in numerous health domains, improving maternal and child health, treatment adherence, frontline worker education, and information collection.SolDevelo already worked with Grameen Foundation on other projects in the past (e.g. Mifos). Because of this, we got involved in the MOTECH platform sometime around early 2012 and we are still contributing today. In the Third World, despite issues related to limited access to water or food, inhabitants of smaller and bigger villages have mobile phones, thanks to which platforms such as MOTECH can contribute more significantly to helping those in need. For this reason, we introduced many changes, related to, above all, MOTECH’s integration with the OpenMRS, Commcare, and DHIS2 systems, in order to provide comprehensive mHealth solutions.

Solution

SolDevelo employees implemented new solutions designed to refine the functioning of the Tasks module, which currently acts as an intermediary system between Commcare, OpenMRS, and DHIS2. Improving the way that MOTECH integrates with external systems was one of the priorities for the Dimagi implementations in Mozambique and Nepal. We also focused on UI and performance improvements in order to make the system more accessible for the end-user. Through the years, dozens of SolDevelo developers were involved in the MOTECH project in some capacity.

Result

In order to streamline the functioning of the MOTECH platform, the SolDevelo team worked on the improvement of the quality of integration of the modules. Improved data exchange between the modules will significantly facilitate the work of healthcare employees in the Third World. MOTECH implementations built on top of the platform use it to coordinate data between multiple systems, such as Commcare, OpenMRS, DHIS, as well as SMS and IVR systems, used for messaging users.