Bringing Visibility to Community Health Work with mHealth Systems: A Case of Malawi

The paper explores how technology created visibility of work and its implications. Places create social meanings and significance in which work is situated. Community health work is mostly confined in places of physical settings for many mobile and distributed workers. As their work contexts stretch in place and far from other actors, the visibility of their work becomes blurry. An in-depth interpretive case study of a mobile health system designed to support decision-making for Community Health Workers in maternal and infant care in Malawi was used to unravel how mHealth systems make their work visible. We uncover work aspects like; work interactions, collaboration, coordination, surveillance among others that flow through place and space in our empirical findings. Each relates to work visibility/invisibility creating both theoretical and practical implications.

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