Exploring digital health interventions to support community health workers in low-and-middle-income countries during pandemic response: a scoping review protocol.
Creators: name: Feroz, Anam
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Health Information Technology
subject: Public Health
subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Community Health and Preventive Medicine
subject: Health Services Research

description: Protocol Overview To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scoping review to explore the unique digital health interventions that have been used to support community health workers in LMICs in the midst of pandemic. By identifying the unique DHIs and its associated barriers and facilitators for use and adoption among CHWs, our findings will offer providers, health system leaders, and policy makers evidence-informed recommendations on how to support CHWs in carrying out Covid-19 related and other routine healthcare services in LMICs. Limitations A potential limitation of this study is the lack of quality assessment for included studies. Although a quality appraisal is not required in scoping reviews [16,18,19], we hope to improve the quality and rigor of our approach by limiting our search to original and primary research studies with well-established methodologies (ie, randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, cohort, case-control, cross-sectional, qualitative studies, and study protocols). We recognize that our focus on primary research studies may exclude relevant review-level evidence. However, since the review-level evidence on use of digital health interventions to support CHWs during pandemic is limited, our focus on primary studies will allow us to capture range of DHIs and its associated barriers for adoption and use among CHWs in LMICs. In addition, operationalizing the term “community health workers” in our search was challenging since Community health workers are known by many different names in different countries. Bhattacharyya et al. and Gilroy &amp; Winch list altogether 36 different terms by which CHWs are known in different countries, which is not exhaustive. Several in-depth discussions and a careful review of the literature was performed to inform our operational definition of “community health workers”. We hope that our choice of search terms is purposefully broad enough to identify relevant digital health interventions being used to support CHWs in different LMICs during pandemic. Future research should be considered to assess the effectiveness of these digital health interventions being implemented to support community health workers in carrying out assigned tasks in LMICs during Covid-19 and beyond pandemic period. Conclusions The immense physical, psychological, and emotional burden on community health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to critically examine the use of digital health interventions to support community health workers in delivering their assigned tasks. Although technology-driven innovations in health care generally aim to improve access, quality, and health outcomes, it is also possible for these interventions to benefit community health workers via remote data collection and health assessments, contract tracing and health education using short message service, voice message, digital megaphones, and digital tracking systems. The results from our scoping review of primary research studies will provide valuable insight for the use of digital health interventions to optimize CHWs’ functioning for the delivery of Covid-19 related tasks and other essential healthcare services at the community level. and will reveal current knowledge gaps in research.