Implementing a Virtual Collaboration Platform for African Health Workers : The eDokita Initiative

Health systems in Africa have posted unimpressive results in the last two decades or so. This almost ubiquitous under-performance among African countries is due to several interrelated and disparate factors arising from economic, socio-cultural, political and organizational deficiencies. Health personnel are.key inputs and process facilitators in everysystem: hence goals attainment is linked to how they perform within the system irrespective of resource profile. Most of sub-Saharan Africa has a disease pattern that is dominated by preventable and treatable infectious diseases. The availability of timely and appropriate information and guidelines to health personnel will increase the inherent capacity of the systems. Traditional pre-service and in-service training approaches are being shown to have very minimal effect on quality of Health Services delivered. In places where available, they are too far between because of the expense, suitability to the actual practice environment and most practitioners are not able to take time off their busy schedules. However current evidence suggests that a higher mileage on staff performance can be achieved through just-in-time training. This serves to provide.the personnel with the appropriate knowledge that they need at the time they need it. Providing such an opportunity in distributed means guarantees accessibility. The eDokita Initiative focuses on addressing these issues through the deployment of an online collaboration platform for African medical doctors, which will guarantee that their information, education and communication needs are met. The initiative uses the medium of the internet to create a portal platform for a Community of Practice for Africa. The portal being database driven will support integrated content publishing, download, member authentication,mailing lists, webmail, bulletin boards or forums, chat, search, archiving, surveys and polls, article comments among other features. Hence facilitating synchronous and asynchronous communication among professionals from diverse fields and different geopolitical locations. Research has been carried out in the last two years on how such a platform can be implemented at least cost while achieving the intended functionality and integration This has led us to several open source tools for portal development, which are being tested. This will reduce the barrier to deploying such integrated platforms in Africa, thus bridging the digital divide. We expect a beta version of the portal to be fully functional by August 2003. Meanwhile a prototype can be accessed at www.edokita.com, The purpose of these papers is to share our experience in the availability of low-cost tools that can be used to deploy initiatives by the different health networks in Africa. Another aim is to establish an actual Community of Practice and track its evolution over time to enable us to develop a benchmark for an Africa e-health medium based on open-source models