USAID Advancing Nutrition worked to improve the coverage and quality of nutrition services. Digital tools can play an important role in that effort, guiding service providers through the delivery of nutrition services such as the assessment of nutritional status, growth monitoring, and tracking developmental milestones. They can also suggest next steps and even appropriate counseling topics and be used to create a longitudinal record of growth measurements, providing health workers with more information to inform their care and counseling. Digital tools can inform managers and supervisors of gaps in service coverage and quality by providing timely access to data. Over the past 10 years, the use of digital applications by health programs and for health service delivery has grown from small pilot projects to national-scale deployments in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Using Digital Tools for Nutrition
In 2020, USAID Advancing Nutrition conducted a landscape analysis to explore how digital tools have been used for the delivery of nutrition services, including GMP, and organized a panel presentation at the Global Digital Health Forum to share the findings.
In 2021, we took a closer look at how digital tools can be used for improving growth monitoring and promotion (GMP). We reviewed global recommendations, training packages, national protocols, and counseling materials related to GMP. Following the example set by the World Health Organization (WHO) with their SMART Guidelines and Digital Adaptation Kits, we developed a Guidance Package for Developing Digital Tracking and Decision-Support Tools (DTDS) for Growth Monitoring and Promotion Services to facilitate the development of digital tools to support the delivery and supervision of GMP services. To develop the guidance we sought expert review and validated it in Ghana and Nepal. To disseminate the package we held a webinar and shared our work with the global nutrition community.
The Government of Nepal has begun to use the package to develop DTDS tools appropriate for their context. In Honduras, USAID Advancing Nutrition developed a digital system to help health workers capture, process, analyze, and report information related to GMP services. By the end of September 2023, a total of 56 health facilities in the 11 municipalities were using the system and had uploaded more than three thousand monthly reports of services provided to nearly ten thousand children under five.