19/11/2018
week vibe, the stuff we love to do.
NEW IN, OLD OUT.
“What is an improvement in the delivery of health systems without a corresponding innovation in data? Well, emerging technologies are capable of changing any status: they are faster, offer paramount impact and so forth and this creates a certain feel among our demographic dividend thinking “machines is the new employee of the year”. A certain software developer said he is not automating away any jobs but rather augmenting them. And yes, innovativeness is the way to go and we cannot escape that fact, but one thing is for sure, computers will continue telling us what happened but they are less likely to tell the why part. Therefore, dear youths, we need to keep our minds in check and hands dirty to feed the technology.
Now let us talk data collection, for the past years, it has been paper on paper, one goes to the field with piles and piles, this is still the trend because adopting new technologies tends to make people think that a certain group of people will not be benefiting. For example, I shared with someone the beauty of an electronic data collection tool, and there response was simply, “paper questionnaires are still needed.” Open Data Kit commonly referred to as ODK is an electronic data collection tool which began as a google.org sponsored project a decade ago and hooray!!!To the researchers no more paper, talk about printing costs. However, the question still lingers, how many have actually interfaced with it? Our (RHDCA) experience using it has been very advantageous, and the best part is that, no more data entry because it is from the server, to the tablet and back to the server.
Anyone can make changes, but an experienced person knows what changes to make and the rest is a walk in the park. Let us thus embrace new technologies.
Google.org
