NoviGuide

About the project

NoviGuide turns neonatal nurses into super-nurses, offering them WHO guidelines and drug dosage calculations in an interactive experience. In the process, nurses contribute to national knowledge of infant illness and current-moment clinical resources. NoviGuide is a tablet-based point-of-care application developed over the course of four years, in concert with neonatal experts in South Africa and Uganda.

Many neonatal healthcare workers in the developing world are given an extremely broad mandate, from neonatal assessment to dispensing and administration of medications — and this often on top of assisting in deliveries! In other words, they are called on to have a broader range of knowledge than a typical Western clinician, and so it is no wonder that they may neglect or forget details of the complex and calculation-intensive protocols of newborn care.
NoviGuide seeks to save newborn lives by giviung access to WHO protocols at healthcare workers, and in such a way that the information is available at just the time they need it. In addition, the data collection achieved provides insight into epidemiology and practices at remote clinics.

Although there are many mHealth applications, there are none that provide this type of information and guidance to neonatal healthcare workers. It has taken nearly 4 years of effort by a neonatologist, medical and program consultants, and technology workers to encapsulate neonatal guidelines in this interactive format, using standards of rigor high enough to satisfy university-level research, and potential future regulation as a medical device. Further, the standards of design have had to be extremely high as a premise of a University of California San Francisco research study underway in Tororo, Uganda, is that clinical workers are not required to use NoviGuide. Therefore, all of the nearly 2000 assessments done in the past year have been voluntary, thanks to the design of the application.