Article type
Year
Abstract
Background:
Africa has emerged as the fastest growing mobile telephone market, with over 60% of people having access to mobiles. Local ICT development clusters flourish, providing promising opportunities for the development of applications. Challenges with improving health outcomes in Africa include lack of medicines, appropriate policies, funding and access to evidence. Cochrane provides access to free high quality research evidence to African servers and facilitates African authors to generate evidence in priority areas. However, there is a missing communication and capacity link to enable policy makers, providers and consumers to access relevant reviews from The Cochrane Library. This is a case of global knowledge inequity. Research evidence is available to healthcare workers through books, internet, CDs from the World Health Organization Reproductive Health Library and The Cochrane Library. However, these resources are not in an appropriate user friendly format and are not accessible to providers and users when most needed.
Objectives:
To reach African consumers with tailored selection of reviews from The Cochrane Library for iPad.
Methods:
We selected Cochrane Reviews published in 2013 relevant to Africa using a tool developed to classify, score and evaluate systematic reviews by burden of disease, authorship and results relevant to Africa.
Results:
We reviewed 757 Cochrane Review abstracts from 52 Cochrane Groups: 106 abstracts were shortlisted by burden of disease, further shortlisted to 42 based on relevance, then to 15 final reviews. These were published in the November 2013 iPad edition of The Cochrane Library.
Conclusions:
The tool helped classify and select systematic reviews in a scientific and transparent manner. There is still, however, low uptake of Cochrane evidence through mobile devices because this is only limited to the iPad. There is a need to revolutionise dissemination of evidence to all mobile platforms, including SMS and Ushahidi, as these have high penetration in Africa.
Africa has emerged as the fastest growing mobile telephone market, with over 60% of people having access to mobiles. Local ICT development clusters flourish, providing promising opportunities for the development of applications. Challenges with improving health outcomes in Africa include lack of medicines, appropriate policies, funding and access to evidence. Cochrane provides access to free high quality research evidence to African servers and facilitates African authors to generate evidence in priority areas. However, there is a missing communication and capacity link to enable policy makers, providers and consumers to access relevant reviews from The Cochrane Library. This is a case of global knowledge inequity. Research evidence is available to healthcare workers through books, internet, CDs from the World Health Organization Reproductive Health Library and The Cochrane Library. However, these resources are not in an appropriate user friendly format and are not accessible to providers and users when most needed.
Objectives:
To reach African consumers with tailored selection of reviews from The Cochrane Library for iPad.
Methods:
We selected Cochrane Reviews published in 2013 relevant to Africa using a tool developed to classify, score and evaluate systematic reviews by burden of disease, authorship and results relevant to Africa.
Results:
We reviewed 757 Cochrane Review abstracts from 52 Cochrane Groups: 106 abstracts were shortlisted by burden of disease, further shortlisted to 42 based on relevance, then to 15 final reviews. These were published in the November 2013 iPad edition of The Cochrane Library.
Conclusions:
The tool helped classify and select systematic reviews in a scientific and transparent manner. There is still, however, low uptake of Cochrane evidence through mobile devices because this is only limited to the iPad. There is a need to revolutionise dissemination of evidence to all mobile platforms, including SMS and Ushahidi, as these have high penetration in Africa.