Kenya eMentorship Tool Improves Service Delivery

How completely and consistently services are delivered is a key component in how successfully facilities provide support to people living with HIV. To assess service delivery, technical advisors (TA) under the PACT Endeleza program in Kenya had been using paper-based check lists which were then summarized in reports to guide the technical assistance provided to facility staff.  With twice monthly visits and a large number of facilities, the TA staff were facing challenges producing timely summaries to guide their workplans. To help solve this challenge and to ensure timely data driven TA to facilities, program leadership reached out to Ciheb’s regional Health Informatics (HI) team. 

Working together, the program team responsible for providing TA and the HI team established the system requirements and set about developing the eMentorship tool.

The application was designed with a dynamic approach to allow electronic collection of the check lists while also enabling narrative summary of assessment findings. The updates can be jointly viewed in real time by the TA team, program administrators, and supervisors to rapidly guide strengthening or improvement activities at the facility.

The eMentorship tool was successfully piloted in the PACT Endeleza program in July of 2020 during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic where innovative solutions to improve program efficiency were desperately needed. The feedback from the TA staff following the pilot indicated that the eMentoring tool improved both efficiency and efficacy when conducting site assessments and sharing results with facility staff to plan changes and improvements.

They reported that the greatest benefit came in no longer having to physically transcribe evaluations and manually complete checklists. Instead, they were able to quickly record data once and then used that data to make decisions. The narrative sections from TA visits were all organized in one tab in the app (Figure 1) allowing for a holistic electronic summary of findings.

Figure 1: List of Comments from TA Visits

Use of the eMentorship tool was then expanded to the PACT Timiza program and is now in use in the new CONNECT program implemented by Ciheb-Kenya with support from Ciheb-UMB, and can be easily adapted for other programs, settings, and assessment tools.