Table 2 Experiences of the CHWs with the Geohealth mobile application

Many ways of using Geohealth

I’ve been using Geohealth for 3 years. I use it on home visits to register families, to look up things about my area like how many kids I have in my area. I write the summaries in the homes by hand, and then I transfer it to the Geohealth system using a cell phone or computer. Usually computer because my Geohealth phone broke.

I don’t use [Geohealth] in home visits. For example, let’s say today I did 10 visits. Tomorrow I do 10 more. At the end of tomorrow, I’ll sit down and put all 20 visits into the computer. I don’t like typing on the phone. It is better at a computer. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a visit, and then another community member comes along and I have to answer a quick question for them—but there is no way to do these two visits simultaneously on Geohealth. Sometimes it takes 15 min just to turn on, or to find a SUS [identification] number in the system—that’s the time my entire visit should take. I use the computer 90% of the time for Geohealth.

Organization

I use Geohealth to register families, and to update information about families. If there is a new baby or new family member, or death. Families are always changing… Each month a new family arrives or leaves.

Accountability

I still use paper to collect signatures at every house I visit to prove that I went to the house. You have situations where a community member goes straight to the health center asking for an appointment and says that a CHW never visited. I can show them that they signed on such and such day proving that I did go there. This helps avoid a lot of confusion. It is a strategy community members have: to say we didn’t go to their house to try to get seen sooner. We need to account for every house we visit.