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Standards of care
When people are sick, they look for treatment and advice that will make them better. Unfortunately for many, especially those in poor parts of world, the search will be difficult and correct treatment will be hard to find. The goal of D-tree is to ensure that whenever a person sees a health worker for care, they receive the correct advice and treatment.
This is done through the development and use of clinical standards of care in a format that is easy to use by health workers at each level of the system. Standards of care provide the basis for quality improvement, simplify monitoring and evaluation, and compensate for the shortage of trained professionals in the health work force. A number of studies have shown that non-physician health workers following clinical standards deliver as good or better care as medical doctors.
D-tree International has been working with a number of partners since 2004 to develop and evaluate the use of mobile phone applications to assist health workers by guiding them step-by-step through medical algorithms during patient encounters in primary care settings. The symptom-based algorithms guide the health worker through a series of questions leading to a diagnosis and treatment for each patient.
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