A simple mobile phone–based technology could enable patients in rural Africa to provide valuable feedback about the care they receive from community health workers, according to a study presented at the recent Association for Computing Machinery conference on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing.

Community health workers are a key conduit to health care in many parts of rural Africa and India. But ensuring their accountability can be challenging and patients may be mistreated, according to a press statement from the authors. The multinational research team designed and tested a system that enabled patients to submit anonymous feedback about health workers and hospitals through unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), a communications technology that’s available on any mobile phone. Mobile phone users in rural areas currently use USSD to check how much prepaid phone time they have available. The system was free for users.

“People are already used to placing calls and texting—I think the innovation here is that you can go back to those mundane technologies and transform them into something else,” lead author Fabian Okeke, a doctoral student in information science at Cornell Tech in New York City, said in the statement.

根据最近在计算机协会召开的关于计算机支持的合作工作和社会计算的会议上进行的一项研究，一项基于手机的简单技术可以使非洲农村地区的患者提供有关他们从社区卫生工作者获得的护理的宝贵反馈。

社区卫生工作者是非洲和印度农村许多地区卫生保健的重要渠道。但是，根据作者的新闻声明，确保问责制可能具有挑战性，患者可能会受到虐待。跨国研究团队设计并测试了一个系统，该系统使患者能够通过非结构化补充服务数据（USSD）提交有关卫生工作者和医院的匿名反馈，该数据可在任何手机上使用。农村地区的移动电话用户当前使用USSD检查他们有多少预付费电话时间。该系统对用户免费。

“人们已经习惯于拨打电话和发短信了，我认为这里的创新在于您可以回到那些平凡的技术上，并将其转化为其他东西，”第一作者，康奈尔科技大学信息科学博士生Fabian Okeke说道。约克市在声明中说。