Connecting the Dots in Nutritional Rehabilitation: A Qualitative Study on ICT and Community Based Care

TL;DR

This study explores how ICT can facilitate integrated care for malnutrition by emphasizing the importance of understanding stakeholder perspectives and contextual complexities in designing effective solutions.

Contribution

It highlights the necessity of recognizing interconnected stakeholder interactions and contextual dynamics for successful ICT-enabled integration in malnutrition management.

Findings

ICT can help overcome care fragmentation in malnutrition management.

Understanding stakeholder perspectives is crucial for effective ICT implementation.

Contextual complexities must be considered in designing ICT solutions.

Abstract

'Fragmentation in care' continuum is often considered as a shortcoming of Health system whereas, 'Integration of care' is widely acclaimed as a viable solution to fragmentation. In last two decades, Information and communication technologies (ICTs), by virtue of their ability to integrate information for action, has been extensively used in addressing many public health problems like malnutrition. Tackling the public health challenge of malnutrition demands attention to interconnectedness and interactions between multiple systems. In this paper, using a case study of an ICT application used by community workers for malnutrition management in Karnataka, we argue that lack of recognition of interconnectedness and interactions among stakeholders and context can pose a challenge to integration of care. ICTs can be key enablers to overcome fragmentation, provided it recognizes the inherent complexities of malnutrition and its management. We argue that for an effective ICT enabled integration of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) management, a thorough understanding of perspectives of multiple stakeholders together with rich picture of the contextual dynamics should not be ignored at design and implementation phase.