The Adamawa State Government has started the process of scaling up the digital diagnosis protocol for acute childhood diseases to five other states.
Adamawa, the first state in the country to adopt the protocol called Algorithm for the Management of Childhood Diseases (ALMANACH), opened a train-the-trainers workshop on Thursday for 30 doctors and other health officials who will visit the five states to scale down the knowledge of ALMANACH application to health officials.
The five states are Kano, Kaduna, Taraba, Gombe and Yobe.
Declaring the train-the-trainer workshop open on Thursday, the Executive Chairman of Adamawa State Primary Health Care Development Agency (ADSPHCDA), Dr Suleiman Bashir, said the training is the fulfilment of a decision made during the last National Council of Health meeting in Imo State where Adamawa presented the project, ALMANACH.
“The meeting adopted that digital healthcare is the way to go, and we are scaling up the project to five other states that have shown active interest to deploy the innovation,” Dr Suleiman said.
He explained that the Thursday’s meeting in Yola was an orientation for the team that will go to the five states to prepare grounds for the implementation of ALMANACH.
According to him, ALMANACH is basically a protocol run on an app for diagnosis which enables health workers to make timely consultations and diagnoses.
Also speaking during the opening of the training in Yola, Dr Ibrahim Sahabo, Programme Manager of ALMANACH, said the protocol is an electronic decision-supporting system that enhances use of IMCI (Intergrated Management of Childhood Illnesses), which is what ALMANACH has adopted and developed into an algorithm which runs on an application on Android devices.
Sahabo added that it is an e-health initiative configured on a computer tablet and used by health officers.
A Senior Lecturer with Modibbo Adama University Teaching Hospital, Yola, Dr Apollos Nachanuya, who was one of the trainers for the train-the-trainers workshop, said ALMANACH is a vital innovation considering Nigeria’s high mortality rate in children under five years.
“The innovation helps especially primary health centres to diagnose common killer diseases in under-5, especially malaria of which we have a high burden,” Dr Apollos said.
