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Johannesburg 20 March 2013: Vodacom Business, the enterprise division of Vodacom Group, today announced the launch of a number of mHealth initiatives together with its partner Mezzanineware.
Based on a centralised mobile/cloud environment, Vodacom's Mezzanine mHealth services allow health care or technology providers to improve their access to clients, assets and employees. This is done through secure, real-time data collection, information processing, management and reporting. What's more, all mHealth services can be deployed by 3rd party service providers.
"By using our mHealth services our customers can enhance their service delivery, cost-efficiency and return on investment, essentially freeing up their time to focus on their core business," said Maruis Conradie, e/m-Health Executive at Vodacom.
Originally built for the highly demanding health industry, the services have been customised to work across various industry verticals. Vodacom offers four generic solution sets:
| • | Vodacom Mezzanine Workforce Management is a cost effective and easy to implement mobile workforce tool that monitors and evaluates the performance of an individual (e.g. health care worker) based on his/her job description, to ensure that high quality service is provided. This application allows management to link remuneration to performance and quality of service delivered. |
| • | Vodacom Mezzanine Asset Management allows stock levels or measured parameters to be submitted with a mobile or machine-to-machine device on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. By using the application the asset can be monitored from a centralised web-based portal and appropriate management actions automated. This allows health departments to avoid stock-outs on dispensing level. This is important as assuring the availability of drugs is essential in providing quality health care services. |
| • | Vodacom Mezzanine Customer Management provides a standard and integrated mechanism with which customer information can be effectively recorded, tracked, analysed and subsequently reported to the relevant stakeholders for management and interaction. This means that home and community based care services in the primary health care system will be able to manage patient information with real-time, accurate reporting to health departments, corporate employers or funding parties. |
| • | Vodacom Mezzanine Assessment is an event or transaction capturing tool for mobile phones. It uses time-stamp, GPS positioning and the camera of the phone to seamlessly capture and report information in real-time. For example, a health and wellness prevention (screening) module can be used by social and health service providers to enable the implementation of de-centralised preventative programmes on a community, corporate or home-based level. Once a risk has been identified during screening, the application proposes a follow-up action that is specific to the health care service provider. |
The above services are enabled through Mezzanineware (previously called GeoMed Ventures), which has extensive experience in the development of mobile, clinical and administrative decision support systems for emerging markets.
"This partnership enables the latest mobile health services and solutions to be delivered to any part of the African continent. We already have a dozen live commercial deployments, delivering a cross section of our solutions to the benefit of citizens. A stable, robust and wide ranging GSM network is essential to the success of any mobile health solution. While we are network agnostic, locally our partnership with Vodacom enables health providers to cost-effectively manage people, products and services over a distributed area utilizing secure data hosting and innovative mobile technology," said Jaques De Vos, Mezzanine's Managing Director.
Case studies
loveLife
The largest national HIV prevention initiative for young people uses the Vodacom Mezzanine platform to monitor and report on loveLife events hosted across South Africa. loveLife field workers are equipped with web-enabled smart phones and laptops. These field workers then use a Mezzanine-designed mobile data capturing system to eliminate manual data capturing. On top of this over 1,250 field workers report on their activities using a mobile data reporting system, which quality assures the data that is submitted and reduces reporting time significantly. Currently more than 200 000 citizens are reached by these field workers on a monthly basis.
The University of Pretoria Community Orientated Primary Care (UP - COPC) mobile health project
From the project's start in October 2011 one hundred Community Health Workers (CHWs) have swopped their paper based questionnaires for a Vodacom Mezzanine mobile application. The CHWs register households and individuals on their mobiles and then do basic health risk assessment screening in less than half the time taken with paper based systems. The Mezzanine mobile data capturing system has built-in decision support workflow that guides CHWs to ask the correct questions to the correct individual and then assists them in identifying health risks in the community. The data is immediately uploaded and available on the Mezzanine web interface for the CHWs' respective health post managers to report on. So far more than 20,000 households and 52,000 individuals have been registered in the eight Health Posts located in the Tshwane district.
Lesotho
Tanzania (EN)
DR Congo
Mozambique
South Africa
