ArticleMalaria journal2014
Comparison of a mobile phone-based malaria reporting system with source participant register data for capturing spatial and temporal trends in epidemiological indicators of malaria transmission collected by community health workers in rural Zambia.
Article in Malaria journal, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Community-Based Health Information Systems in Africa: A Scoping Review of Data Generation, Utilization, and Community Empowerment.Wellcome open research · 2024Pooled it
- Towards a framework for analyzing determinants of performance of community health workers in malaria prevention and control: a systematic review.Human resources for health · 2018Pooled it
- Experiences in running a complex electronic data capture system using mobile phones in a large-scale population trial in southern Nepal.Global health action · 2017Trial
- Mobile app-based malaria surveillance and vector control integration: a scoping review of evidence from endemic settings.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- Effect of exposure to malaria messages on insecticide-treated net use among women and under-five children in Uganda: a propensity score matched analysis.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- How Can Community Data Be Leveraged to Advance Primary Health Care? A Scoping Review of Community-Based Health Information Systems.Global health, science and practice · 2024Article
- Healthcare Workers' Perspectives of mHealth Adoption Factors in the Developing World: Scoping Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Improvements in malaria surveillance through the electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (eIDSR) system in mainland Tanzania, 2013-2021.Malaria journal · 2022Article
- Emergence of behavioural avoidance strategies of malaria vectors in areas of high LLIN coverage in Tanzania.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Emergence of behavioural avoidance strategies of malaria vectors in areas of high LLIN coverage in Tanzania.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Evaluating fidelity of community health worker roles in malaria prevention and control programs in Livingstone District, Zambia-A bottleneck analysis.BMC health services research · 2020Article
- A mobile phone based tool to identify symptoms of common childhood diseases in Ghana: development and evaluation of the integrated clinical algorithm in a cross-sectional study.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2018Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTimeliness, completeness, and accuracy are key requirements for any surveillance system to reliably monitor disease burden and guide efficient resource prioritization. Evidence that electronic reporting of malaria cases by community health workers (CHWs) meet these requirements remains limited. METHODOLOGY: Residents of two adjacent rural districts in Zambia were provided with both passive and active malaria testing and treatment services with malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) and artemisinin-based combination therapy by 42 CHWs serving 14 population clusters centred around public sector health facilities. Reference data describing total numbers of RDT-detected infections and diagnostic positivity (DP) were extracted from detailed participant register books kept by CHWs. These were compared with equivalent weekly summaries relayed directly by the CHWs themselves through a mobile phone short messaging system (SMS) reporting platform.
resultsSlightly more RDT-detected malaria infections were recorded in extracted participant registers than were reported in weekly mobile phone summaries but the difference was equivalent to only 19.2% (31,665 versus 25,583, respectively). The majority (81%) of weekly SMS reports were received within one week and the remainder within one month. Overall mean [95% confidence limits] difference between the numbers of register-recorded and SMS-reported RDT-detected malaria infections per CHW per week, as estimated by the Bland Altman method, was only -2.3 [-21.9, 17.2]. The mean [range] for both the number of RDT-detected malaria infections (86 [0, 463] versus 73.6 [0, 519], respectively)) and DP (22.8% [0.0 to 96.3%] versus 23.2% [0.4 to 75.8%], respectively) reported by SMS were generally very consistent with those recorded in the reference paper-based register data and exhibited similar seasonality patterns across all study clusters. Overall, mean relative differences in the SMS reports and reference register data were more consistent with each other for DP than for absolute numbers of RDT-detected infections, presumably because this indicator is robust to variations in patient reporting rates by location, weather, season and calendar event because these are included in both the nominator and denominator. DISCUSSION/
conclusionThe SMS reports captured malaria transmission trends with adequate accuracy and could be used for population-wide, continuous, longitudinal monitoring of malaria transmission.
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