This project is for Community Medicine Department of Yenepoya (Deemed to be University). Yenepoya is located in the vibrant, multi-cultural and coastal city of Mangalore, Karnataka.
Department of community medicine engages in the following activities

1. Assess the health needs of the community and plan and implement appropriate need-based health interventions.
2. To provide quality community-oriented medical education to the undergraduate and postgraduate medical students
3. To create social physicians capable of providing comprehensive care
4. To conduct socially relevant field-based research
5. To facilitate the implementation of National Health Programmes in coordination with district health and family welfare departments.

This project is to develop an IT system for their Health and Demographic Surveillance program or “Kutumba Aarogya Sarvekshana Hagu Rakhsana Yojane”. The platform is to enable them with the following:

1. Change from paper-based data capture to paper-less (Electronic format)
2. Community-based efficient, quality data capture, analysis and reporting.
3. The transition from survey to surveillance.
4. Geospatial mapping of health problems and diseases with respect to time, place and person distribution.
5. Understanding of the disease trends by collecting longitudinal data
6. Addition of new projects and variables in the established IT platform.
7. Monitoring and supportive supervision of field staff.
8. Capture data from special groups on a periodic basis like Pregnant mothers, lactating mothers, children less than 5 years, adolescents, individuals with Diabetes, Individuals with Hypertension, NCD (Non communicable Disease) risk factors (18-60 years), Geriatric population and fever survey (last 15 years).
9. Surveillance studies it is empirical to have real-time, continuous data monitoring and relational data capture through IT platform for assessing health needs and planning health services

The project is to cater to the need of a population of 1 lakh in the first year. The IT system is to be used by a team 60 users comprising of field workers, supervisors, a program coordinator, a program manager and a statistician.

The project started in the month of Dec 2019. Requirements, scope and solution were identified through a series of online discussions as well as 1 one-day face-to-face workshop in their department.

The project will be done by Samanvay Foundation as an implementation of open-source fieldwork platform Avni.

Most of the requirements will be met by existing features present in Avni. Following features were identified as gaps and decided to be added to the platform through this project

1. Household Support

A need was also identified to add a feature to send SMS to the beneficiaries. However, this was deprioritised after discussion with them.

Scope was finalised and development started in the month of April 2020.

On a lighter note, in my visit to Mangalore for the face-to-face, Dr Abhay, head of department of community medicine and our PoC took me around the city. And it was a delight to visit one of these grand ice-cream parlours which I thought are something quite unique to the city. They have some amazing varieties. While ‘Gadbad‘ is most popular I liked their ‘iPizza’ more! Do try it out when you happen to be in the city 🙂