A mobile application used for the implementation of home based care: a case study of COVID-19 in Uganda

Abstract

With the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) the health sector around the world has been faced with many challenges. This has created a need for alternative methods of offering treatment; and among them is Home Based Care (HBC). Home Based Care is a health system where patients are offered treatment in their localities or homes. The main objective under this project was to develop a mobile system application to facilitate and support monitoring of patients in Home Based Care so as to handle pandemics like COVID 19, and at the same time meant to be used by Village Health Teams (VHTs) to capture information from patients under treatment in their localities. The evolutionary prototyping methodology was used to develop the application system. Furthermore, both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods such as document review, interviews, observation methods and questionnaires were used to collect data about this research project. At last, a government Home Based Care application to facilitate the handling of pandemics like COVID-19 was developed. It shows that majority of the respondents believe the system will be able to reduce or solve the identified problem in this dissertation. Majority of the users and those who got to use the application agree that the application is easy to use and navigate. The respondents also expressed their confidence in the application’s ability to enable the implementation of Home Based Care as an alternative to offering health care in situations of pandemics like COVID 19. In this project, we carried out unit testing, integration testing, and system testing and user acceptance testing as a means of carrying out software validation. The developed application passed successively all of the tests meaning that the developed application perform as it was expected. Based on the scope of this project, many of the features were not included in this prototype. Some of the known future works will be to add an admin account which will be managing the application. This account will be able to oversee all the VHT Officer accounts and will also be able to monitor the patient’s progress