The introduction of NeoTree Project at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) has been significant in Data management; which is an important area in healthcare. Health Care Workers (HCWs) are now able to make prompt and informed decisions with quality data at their fingertips. Clinicians are directly involved in monitoring and building the data dashboards each month which are uploaded to digital displays on the ward. With this data, the highly motivated and enthusiastic HCW noticed that many of the admissions with hypothermia are from inside the facility.

The NeoTree System: 4 tablets, a printer and dashboard at Ethel Nursery Ward KCH

When looking at the babies referred from within KCH (labour ward, surgery, etc) they could see that 72% of them had hypothermia. They were motivated to devise mechanisms to bring this figure down, for example: using an incubator for transferring newborns to the nursery, heating Chitenges before the baby is born and stabilizing the baby’s temperature before transferring to the nursery. This led to a 30-40% drop in the number of babies that had hypothermia on admission.  The NeoTree data allowed them to visualize the data of the babies in their care, identify a gap where they could have an impact, make relevant improvements and then see the success of those improvements

The Electronic Ethel Mutharika Nursery Dashboard

Data Dashboard prototypes have been developed to give three outputs that help the HCWs in decision making and understanding the quality and gaps in care – these are being developed to update in real-time and display; monthly mortality & morbidity (M&M) reports, a summary statistics dashboard, and a quality improvement dashboard screen which targets the problem of admission hypothermia.

A paper-based Ethel Mutharika Nursery Ward statistic