Connect for Life Distribution
- Paweł Gesek
- Piotr Wargulak
Connect for Life™ (powered by Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health) is a communication platform to engage with patients remotely and to provide continuity of care with proven implementation feasibility in HIV, TB, COVID-19 case surveillance and vaccination programs.
Connect for Life™ is a tailored distribution of OpenMRS. The platform enables increased patient and caregiver engagement through the use of basic mobile phones capabilities (e.g. SMS, IVR, WhatsApp) and empowers the patient with self-management possibilities. Connect for Life™ offers two-way communication and sends, for example, automated visit reminders, personalized health tips or survey questions to patients, who then can respond and pass their preferences, outcomes, symptoms and survey answers.
Connect for Life™ was initially launched to reduce the information gap between patient and providers by leveraging mobiles phones. It was based on the MoTech platform to reach people in remote settings with limited health resources available for diseases with a strong stigma like HIV. Connect for Life™ OpenMRS is a next version developed by SolDevelo for Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health that is integrated in OpenMRS. The precursor Connect for Life™ Motech has multiple projects currently ongoing in Philippines, Uganda and India supporting HIV, TB and COVID-19 disease management programs. More information and publications can be found on the website (Connect for Life™ (connect-for-life.org)).
New features and additions are continuously being developed and added, as requirements arise from current partnership insights and new implementations.
Get Started
Connect for Life™ is available as a standard fully functional distribution composed of existing and newly developed modules.
For each newly developed functionality, there is documentation to easily configure the module to your needs. The main focus of the tailored distribution: the patient messaging system along with interesting features for client registration, scheduling visits and interactive reporting in Excel.
Functionalities
The communication platform Connect for Life™ contains multiple features that would benefit the different stakeholders. For the program manager it is easy to extract data from the platform and get comprehensive reports about the people onboarded on the platform as well as to configure new messages or set-up the user roles. For the patients, they can get reminders and personalized health tips (through SMS, IVR, Whatsapp) while giving back information about their symptoms and preferences without going to the hospital. For health care providers they can track the patient’s history in the patient dashboard and register observations for more efficient in-person consultations. Below the main interactions that the stakeholders have with the communications platform Connect for Life™