SmartCare is a US Center for Disease Control (CDC-Zambia) initiated nationally scalable Electronic Health Record System designed specifically for low resource, disconnected settings. The SmartCare solution has the objective of improving the quality of health care (and health) by engineering the means to deliver “Continuity of Care” where existing paper systems are failing to preserve a longitudinal data view, and where clinics may often have no telecommunications. It therefore uses patient carried smart cards, and monthly flash drive based facility by facility database merges, to maintain continuity of records in a robust, inexpensive, and low tech manner, in places where wide area networks and dial up solutions are not yet sustainable. SmartCare v3.2 is currently deployed in Zambia and being pilot tested in other countries.
It uses touch screen data entry (mouse and keyboard may also be used) to enable use of existing staff for capturing data, and it replaces the hand generated management reporting tally and register system to save labor. The ease of data entry makes the system a candidate for clinician user ‘E-First’ deployments, with the attendant real-time clinical decision support possibilities.
Dimagi led development work on the system in 2004 along with several development and implementation partners including
Zambian Ministry of Health
United States Center for Disease Control, Zambia
Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zamia (CIDRZ)
Elizabeth Glaiser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Catholic Relief Services
Features of the system include:
One click PEPFAR and HMIS report genreation
'Circuit Rider' merge capabilities for district, provincial, and national de-identified datasets
SmartCare is a US Center for Disease Control (CDC-Zambia) initiated nationally scalable Electronic Health Record System designed specifically for low resource, disconnected settings. The SmartCare solution has the objective of improving the quality of health care (and health) by engineering the means to deliver “Continuity of Care” where existing paper systems are failing to preserve a longitudinal data view, and where clinics may often have no telecommunications. It therefore uses patient carried smart cards, and monthly flash drive based facility by facility database merges, to maintain continuity of records in a robust, inexpensive, and low tech manner, in places where wide area networks and dial up solutions are not yet sustainable. SmartCare v3.2 is currently deployed in Zambia and being pilot tested in other countries.
