Supporting frontline health workers is vital and we simply cannot wait. There is a critical need to establish a more robust communications and data collection system between health workers and their supervisors in light of the Ebola outbreak. Equipping them with the right kind of information about Ebola diagnosis, treatment, prevention as well as health worker safety, will enable them to support their communities to fight back against Ebola. Information is power and finding the fastest and most efficient ways to disseminate this information is key.

mHero - Health Worker Electronic Response and Outreach – is one way to harness the well-known power of mobile technology to reach frontline health workers. mHero, currently under rapid development with support from a consortium of partners including the UNICEF Global Centre for Innovations, USAID, IntraHealth, K4Health, ThoughtWorks, and Jembi Health Systems is a free SMS mobile phone based communications system between MoH staff, health workers, and community health workers. By supporting the interoperability of IntraHealth’s iHRIS and UNICEF’s RapidPro, and utilizing the OpenHIE architecture, the platform can immediately use the health workforce data from iHRIS to target specific communications based on cadre, location, and other information to potentially 9,000+ health workers whose mobile numbers are captured in the iHRIS database and whose facilties are inter-linked with the DHIS2 system. Communications, which can be triggered both centrally and locally, go far beyond traditional “message blasts” offered by many technology vendors. Real-time monitoring, complex multi-path surveys, monitoring and detailed analysis can be conducted with ease. Furthermore, IVR mLearning approaches will take knowledge delivery one-step beyond SMS with higher content limits and addressing the literacy and language divides through spoken language.