Initial Experience and Evaluation of the SATHI Digital Health Assistant Program

Abstract

Post-COVID, an increasing number of clinicians have adopted digital technology and are shifting towards telecare. This has resulted in increasing their workload as digital data entry needs special skills and especially challenging for the less tech savvy clinicians. Many are unable to work with IT systems and conduct quality remote care. SATHI initiated a Digital Health Assistant program whereby secondary school pass outs were trained to do simple health procedures and health data entry to support clinicians as well as their telehealth services. The training program necessitated planning, designing, and implementation different from the existing formal training programs considering both the trainees basic educational background and industry’s requirement. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the learning effectiveness of the program after evaluation based on Kirkpatrick Four Stage Model. In general, the results demonstrated that students were confident of using the learning in their career. Most of the trainees have been successful in getting employed. English as the course delivery language and the internship work timings have been highlighted as challenges. In conclusion the findings indicate that this could be a good learning model for others in resource restricted settings to address human resource gaps.