How Second Mile is Using Data and Technology to Go the Whole Nine Yards

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Recently, Second Mile Haiti took some baby steps towards tech-savviness. Namely, we installed a new network server that allows us to streamline data input between our three main programs: the Malnutrition Treatment Center, the Strong Start Maternity Center, and our Community Outreach program.

What’s the big deal?

Well, these baby steps are just the beginning of leaps and bounds that we will be taking in the near future to leverage data and technology to make a greater health impact! Our long-term vision is to have a mobile app and centralized database that can be used by Second Mile Haiti as well as other clinics around the country.

National, standardized data on malnutrition and maternal health = more effective allocation of resources = less malnutrition in Haiti.

But we have to start somewhere!

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So we started by establishing our own internal server that hosts all of our data in one place. We’ve been collecting data from the Treatment Center since 2014, on the Community Outreach program since 2016, and on the Maternity Center since March 2018. Just a year ago, just seven Second Mile Haiti staff were set up to use mobile and tablet technology to monitor our programs. Now we have 17 staff connecting in order to upload data and photos, analyze data, share reports, generate invoices, and more.

Basically, if we’re doing it, we’re measuring it. And if we’re measuring it, it’s going into one centralized digital database.

This helps us to run our programs more efficiently, sell our homemade natural products like coconut oil, keep photo-records of each of the malnutrition patients that we treat, track our impact on maternal health, and more. It also helps us generate the monthly report that we share with the Haitian Health Ministry MSPP.

This development marks the beginning of our journey towards nationally standardized data collection and management.  In the future, we plan to work with other clinics to use the same or similar metrics that can be shared via a mobile app. This will give MSPP more information on:

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  1. the prevalence of malnutrition in different areas of the country,

  2. the types of interventions that are effectively treating malnutrition,

  3. potentially, the types of interventions that are effectively preventing malnutrition,

  4. relapse rates, and

  5. areas that need more access to healthcare.

Right now, we are just one small organization with a fancy new network server. But our programs’ success in treating and preventing malnutrition are being noticed by neighboring clinics and by the Haitian Health Ministry. In the future, we hope that the data will speak for itself, making it easier for clinics across the nation to collaborate on ending malnutrition for good.