A Mobile-Based Training Platform for ASHA workers

Pushpendra Singh of IIIT Delhi in India will develop interactive training and mentoring sessions for community health workers in India (ASHAs) using mobile phones and interactive voice response systems so they can provide better public healthcare in rural communities. Current training programs are run by medical professionals and require the workers to visit a health center, which may be inconvenient. The lack of medical experts has also reduced the frequency of these programs. These limitations could be overcome with online sessions whereby one expert trains multiple health workers remotely. They have already developed the format of the sessions, which involves an expert delivering a defined curriculum to groups of health workers followed by a question and answer session, and shown that it improved the knowledge and confidence of the health workers in a pilot test. They will now scale up the testing to 500 health workers, and also evaluate the platform as a peer-to-peer learning mechanism for health workers to share their experiences and learn from each other without the need for an expert.