Digitization of health records in rural villages

We present a study that reviews current available methods for obtaining electronic health records (EHRs) to facilitate the provision of health services to patients from rural villages in developing countries. The study compares processes of digitizing health records by means of manual transcription, both by hiring a professional transcriptionist and by using online crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted to compare the studied transcription methods to an alternate technology-based solution that was developed to support in-the-field direct data entry.

[1]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Feature extraction methods for character recognition-A survey , 1996, Pattern Recognit..

[2]  Manuel Blum,et al.  reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures , 2008, Science.

[3]  Kentaro Toyama,et al.  Managing microfinance with paper, pen and digital slate , 2010, ICTD 2010.

[4]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  E-imci: improving pediatric health care in low-income countries , 2008, CHI.

[5]  Edward D. Lazowska,et al.  Designing an Architecture for Delivering Mobile Information Services to the Rural Developing World , 2006, Seventh IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications (WMCSA'06 Supplement).

[6]  Björn Hartmann,et al.  MobileWorks: A Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform for Workers at the Bottom of the Pyramid , 2011, Human Computation.

[7]  Joseph M. Hellerstein,et al.  Shreddr: pipelined paper digitization for low-resource organizations , 2012, ACM DEV '12.

[8]  Otto Chrons,et al.  Digitalkoot: Making Old Archives Accessible Using Crowdsourcing , 2011, Human Computation.

[9]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  Open data kit: tools to build information services for developing regions , 2010, ICTD.

[10]  Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri,et al.  Indian script character recognition: a survey , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[11]  Sargur N. Srihari,et al.  On-Line and Off-Line Handwriting Recognition: A Comprehensive Survey , 2000, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[12]  Kentaro Toyama,et al.  Numeric paper forms for NGOs , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD).

[13]  Eric Lecolinet,et al.  A Survey of Methods and Strategies in Character Segmentation , 1996, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[14]  James Davis,et al.  A Standards-Based Open Source Application to Gather Health Assessment Data in Developing Countries , 2012, 2012 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference.

[15]  Edward Cutrell,et al.  mClerk: enabling mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions , 2012, CHI.

[16]  Brian A Vander Schee.  Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business , 2009 .

[17]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  Digitizing paper forms with mobile imaging technologies , 2012, ACM DEV '12.