For decades, health facilities across The Gambia have relied on paper registers to record antenatal, delivery, postnatal, immunisation, and child health data. The handwritten logs, often incomplete, inconsistent, or illegible.
In response, a quiet revolution is underway at Bundung Maternal and Child Hospital (BMCH) in Serekunda. The introduction of Smart Paper Technology (SPT), a hybrid system that bridges familiar paper workflows with automated data digitisation, has transformed the country's approach to health information management. The technology works by assigning unique patient identification numbers, barcodes, and QR codes to every mother and child. Health workers fill out structured paper forms at the point of care, just as they always have, but instead of being copied into bulky registers and tallied by hand, the forms are scanned, digitised, and synchronised with District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2), an open-source data platform used globally for health reporting. This innovation preserves the simplicity of paper-based recording while eliminating its inefficiencies.
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