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Table 3 Benefits of the Geohealth application

From: Perspectives and experiences of community health workers in Brazilian primary care centers using m-health tools in home visits with community members

Saves time spent on bureaucratic paper work

Geohealth makes things faster, you can quickly make lists, filter community members, find all of your hypertensives, and find particular families. So I think Geohealth makes things faster, but the information is safer on paper.

It is faster with Geohealth at the end of the month because we have one day of accounting, so to speak. We used to have to count manually—hypertensive by hypertensive— going through all the forms.

Before we had to look through each folder and manually count, manually look for each kid under age 2. Geohealth is way better.

Faster access to information

Geohealth makes the quality of our work better. It helps me make lists of community members in my area. I can choose, for example, to see only the pregnant women in my area, or only the 2 year olds, and then I have a complete list right away

Another example, let’s say a community member has a question about an appointment from a few months ago, like when it was. I can just pull it up right away! Before Geohealth, I’d have to go back to the health center and look through piles of paper to find that information. But it is all stored in Geohealth. Or another example, if a community member has a doubt about what medication she was prescribed. I can pull it up on Geohealth in her house during the visit. I don’t have to come back later.

“It [Geohealth] is really important. It is fundamental. I write down all sorts of information during visits like diabetic’s insulin levels and blood pressure. I write it in the observation field. Then at their next visit I look up their values from last time to see how they’re doing. This is different from the paper system, because paper is saved in the health center. And then I wouldn’t have access.”

Weight

I like it because it means less paper for me. In our work we walk a lot, and our backpacks are heavy, and we end up taking off our backpacks in community members’ homes and forgetting them there.

Biggest difference between Geohealth and paper? My bag is lighter with Geohealth! I don’t have to carry as much paper.

I typed the family number and it had all the information about that family. It was the size of my hand versus [carrying] a mountain of paper. Better to have the device. If Geohealth had all the forms it would eliminate a ton of paper and work for us.