Healthcare delivery occurs in a team-based setting.   During the course of treatment, patients often interact with a large number of providers, each potentially affiliated with a different organization.  Care coordination is complicated; team roles span multiple organizations and locations, and current systems are not well-suited to manage a well-integrated, distributed workflow.

Facilitating teamwork

Although the focus of healthcare IT investment tends to be strongly biased towards physician-oriented electronic medical records systems, improvements in collaboration will require appropriate and well-integrated tools for all care team members. One of the root causes of systemic inefficiency in the healthcare delivery system is poor automation of workflow interactions between care team members.

Complex care doesn’t stop at the hospital door

Furthermore, the primary site of healthcare delivery has been moving away from the acute-care hospital to the home and outpatient clinics. Patient care processes and systems that have been developed for hospital-based care are not well-suited to these new settings; the focus of investment needs to shift towards systems designed specifically for these new care settings.

Our Approach

Dimagi is focused on a variety of initiatives to improve coordination and continuity of care among formal and informal care givers. Our flagship Care Coordination technology, ASHand is currently being developed and piloted to improve home-based cancer care coordination. Our Medication reminder system, ARemind, allow for real-time medication adherence monitoring and improved patients outcomes. Dimagi is constantly seeking innovate uses of technology to improve healthcare delivery through improved coordination.

Mobile solutions, local needs

Our mobile technology is designed with the intention that it will ultimately be supported by local capacity. Our relevant expertise is in mobile health systems, HIS strengthening, technical training, application of healthcare data standards, clinical decision support, requirements and feasibility analysis, and usability design. Dimagi applies the above skills in an advisory function to in-country technical groups. It also performs full software development on a broad range of relevant technologies spanning from the prototype phase to an enterprise national deployment.

A diverse portfolio

Dimagi team members have experience working with many mobile health technologies, and are leaders in several open source mobile health communities, including JavaRosa, CommCare, RapidSMS, and the Open Mobile Consortium. Dimagi has spent considerable time consulting on mobile health systems for a range of applications. Some of these include systems for community health workers to manage HIV care and safe pregnancy, health education programs, logistics management tools, and medication reminders. Dimagi’s engineers have utilized a wide range of technologies and are therefore able to leverage the most appropriate mobile technology quickly, whether it’s SMS, mobile applications, or web applications optimized for netbooks.

No problem too big, no solution too small

From early generation PDAs, to low cost java-capable phones, to the latest Android device, Dimagi has consistently been a leading implementor of mobile technology for organizations and business to operate more efficiently. Our suite of open source libraries and solutions have distilled our years of field experience into a reusable and rapidly deployable tool set for organizations big and small.

Our suite of projects

• JavaRosa :: The library that powers CommCare, and the ODK
• ODK :: A JavaRosa powered Android data collection tool. It allows for multiform data collection from GPS tagged photos, audio, and form data
• RapidSMS :: Programmable SMS based applications for wide field deployment. Supply chain tracking of mosquito bednets
• SMS Google Charts :: Warehouse inventory tracking using an SMS gateway and google spreadsheets for distributed inventory monitoring

We have always believed that for a project to be successful and sustainable, knowledge and maintenance of it must be transferred to local development and support team. To this end we train local staff to develop, maintain, and use their own technologies both while the system is in development and after-the-fact.

User Training

We have helped train teams and individuals to program, maintain and deliver software to clinics throughout Zambia. This ongoing training is part of a larger collaboration between multiple organizations with the goal of creating a strong in-country programming and support personnel for the country.

Collaborative Successes

Dimagi has led or participated in several distributed development teams that have large training components. We have seen and implemented methods and techniques that work in the short and long term, or not at all. These past successes and failures guide us towards making training programs that work. We can assess where problematic technical gaps may exist in team structures that could stop an implementation.

Training Expertise

• Years of in-country support and training time in South Asia, Africa, and other regions
• Remote assistance, training, and troubleshooting on multiple off-site projects
• Experience working with a variety of diverse projects and teams

Access to basic health care and education go hand in hand as human rights. Our solutions address the logistical, scalability and sustainability complexities inherent in education and the distribution of knowledge. Be it new ways of using existing technologies, or inventing something novel, we have the expertise and experience in creating tools to educate the masses.

Experience deploying creative solutions

• Distance learning courses
• Mobile phone based health education curriculum with airtime incentives
• Literacy retention by means of SMS distributions