Design of an interactive medical guideline application for community health workers

Clinical guidelines, such as the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI), are used worldwide to support community health workers in the assessment of severely ill children. These guidelines are distributed in paper form, complicating their use at the point-of-care. We have developed a framework for building advanced clinical guideline applications for the Android mobile phone OS. The framework transfers clinical guidelines into a flexible and interactive electronic format using an XML interpreter. The resulting application supports intuitive navigation of guidelines while assessing the patient, easy integration of patient management tools, and logging of performed assessments and treatments. The novel approach transforms clinical guidelines from a mere paper dictionary into a working tool that integrates into the daily workflow of community health workers and simplifies their task at the care and administrative levels.