In the past few weeks, EpiSurveyor Mobile was used in Ghana in a recurring USAID and PMI (President's Malaria Initiative) activity to calculate critical indicators that are commonly used in PMI decisions.  Ghana is one of the 18 countries that conducts this quarterly activity.  The pilot team, led by John Snow Inc., tested EpiSurveyor Mobile against the pen-and-paper method at various health facilities in Western Ghana.

This week, our partners at John Snow, Inc (JSI) and Management Sciences for Health (MSH) are using EpiSurveyor Mobile Version 1.0 (released last week) for their PMI End-Use Malaria Monitoring Activity (EMMA).

We've been working around the clock for the release of new data analysis features in EpiSurveyor.org. You can watch a video preview of these features. After logging in, you'll now see a dashboard of your forms, and there are two graphs on the right. The first graph shows the number of records submitted for this record over a timespan. The second graph is allows you to track the number of records that answered a specific question to a multiple choice question.

Last month, we released the online and mobile phone versions of EpiSurveyor; 393 users have signed up in this first month.

Too often, candidates walk into an interview believing that the deciding factor for whether or
not they get the job is the interview itself.  Albeit that may be true in some cases, at DataDyne we believe finding the right candidate is like finding the recipe for and making an old fashion chocolate chip cookie:  the ingredients, the making and leaving of the dough, and the baking must all come together. 

On the day before Child Health week, at the National Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, we trained 17 officers on how to conduct their surveys using Nokia 6300 mobile phone.   We asked the staff to work in pairs and taught them how to download surveys from the online Episurveyor server, fill out surveys, and send the surveys back to the episurveyor.org website.   A couple hours later, they were ready to start their actual interviews!  The next day, the health ministry officers were off to conduct their intervie

If you’ve been a beta tester for EpiSurveyor in Africa, then you probably received an email or handout that contained a phone number for the EpiSurveyor Command Center. This is what Command Center looks like. We’re on the top floor of an office building in Upper Hill, Nairobi, equipped with lots of computer monitors and more mobile phones. To my right is Geoff, George, and Solomon. Photo courtesy of Joel’s digital SLR.

After a week of discussions on health IT, here's my take on what's missing from the Stimulus Act:

- The goal of the stimulus act is, among others, cut healthcare costs and implement strategies that are proven to cut costs. Yet, we somehow passed legislation with no talk about integrating mental health initiatives; the money is aimed for diagnositc and treatment health. Where was the meantal health lobbists that should have been harping on the Hill about the cost savings benefits of prevention and promotion programs in mental health?!

Am sitting at HIMSS 2009, an annual conference for the health information technology community. The health IT community is buzzed on anticipation of the 19 billion dollar stimulus bill dedicated to health IT, a whopping 3% of the overall stimulus package. We don't know how that money will be spent -- the federal govt will soon set the new legal policies, standards, and incentives, for this market.

At the beginning of this month, our site was released to a small group of alpha testers.

Web statistics show that: