Contacts

In situations where demographic information needs to be collected, is it possible to utilize the “contact” feature of phones to collect the information in the field, then later sync that information with the database. The gnokii platform allows you to extract this information from the phone, including the date and time it was created. By pairing that date with form-entry dates and times you could insert a step in the entry process which does not expect an answer:

This way demographic information including the given name and family name and phone number of the patient would not be sent across using the SMS protocol. If this was combined with a camera phone, then a picture of each patient could also be taken, which would be useful for preventing fraud and allowing re-identification.

Bluetooth enabled cell-phones could be paired with the primary server at the hospital, so that as community healthcare workers arrived to pickup supplies the contacts would be automatically synced.