“NoviGuide has helped me with warning signs. For example, with a preterm baby, once you input the temperature, it will warn you whether the baby needs extra warmth. When the glucose levels are low, it will warn you. I didn’t know the normal ranges but NoviGuide guides you. And when the newborn needs fluids, it will tell you.”

“We were anxious that NoviGuide was going to add more work to us but when we received it, we realized that the opposite was true: work became easier.”

“People are doing things with confidence, calculating dosages accurately because actually the NoviGuide does it for us. It solves our challenge of delays in developing dosages… Besides all those, at the end of it you get a very beautiful summary of your case. Where sometimes nurses were defeated in making a clear report about a patient, you find in our files these days people can summarize their data very well.”

“We realize especially some of these babies who are brought with a history of crying too much, not breastfeeding, you find that by the time you go and check, their levels of sugar are really too low and it guides you on what to do. It reminds us about our protocol.”

“With the NoviGuide we've been able to assess every baby delivered in this facility… With this we’ve been able to identify babies who are sick on the ward and the mothers who have challenges as well because we have mothers who are delivering for the first time. They don't know how to breastfeed, they don't know how to express, so we’ve been able to demonstrate this to the mothers by visualizing the videos. The mothers need to see exactly what you're talking about, so when you show them the videos they're able to pick it up so fast.”

“With discharge, mostly we think about the mother but with the NoviGuide we’ve been able to identify that every baby needs to be discharged, so we assess these babies to make sure that they fall in the criteria that is needed for them to be discharged, and with this we have been able to discharge well babies, registering few readmissions in the unit.”

“For me, I found it important that before I started using this NoviGuide, in terms of dosage, we could just say we could give 1ml. But now, when we started using this, when you go through it, it will give you the dosage of the drug that you’re supposed to give the baby. For example, yesterday's baby was 3.7kg and the dosage of ampicillin was like 1.9 whereby in those days, we would just give 1ml, meaning that you could give the baby an underdose. So, I found it important in that way.”

“But with the use of NoviGuide, most of those babies who would have died because of not applying what was required are saved. Because you act immediately and then you save the baby. Unlike those days when we were not using NoviGuide, when you just assume this baby is okay. Then all of a sudden you come back and they tell you, “Do you remember the other baby you delivered? The baby died.” Then you ask yourself, “What could have happened? What happened? Did the father do this? Did the mother suffocate the baby?” But possibly, the mother has not suffocated the baby but the baby was at risk of a problem which you never noticed just because you never had ways of maybe observing or finding out that problem in advance. But now with the NoviGuide at birth, it really puts you on the alert. And then you have to act where it is due.”

“As you enter the vital signs, it tells you what to do next, not have to ask somebody else or to wait for a doctor to come and help you. So, you just go on systematically, In case you are making a mistake, it will tell you, ‘Here, you have made a mistake,’ in case, maybe, like the gestation was not term, it will either tell you it is a premature and then what sort of premature it is and how you can manage the baby.”

“I have realized that the learning part of it is very important. Like when you show them the video on discharge, they really appreciate it. There are certain things which they were taking for granted that it’s not important but once they start watching how the babies is attached on the breast, how when the baby has fever, the cord, septic cord, the discharges from the eyes, they open their eyes, they are like, ‘Wow.’ And then, they are now very much sensitized that when we look at these danger signs, we are supposed to come back. So, that one has also been very helpful to the community.”

Clinicians in Uganda and the DRC have voluntarily used NoviGuide, our point-of-care tablet application for neonatal medicine, to complete more than 100,000 baby assessments

Each assessment helps clinicians perform structured observations of a newborn to detect danger signs, identify their cause, and treat illness according to evidence-based guidelines.

NoviGuide 1.0 was completed in the mid-2010s, piloted in the Tororo region of Uganda, and studied as part of a UCSF initiative; with version 2.5 in 2023, NoviGuide began to scale up to dozens of clinics; it is now in version 2.6 and its adoption continues to expand to more clinics

We want to reach 1,000,000 newborn assessments per year and we want to expand NoviGuide to more areas of medicine, starting with obstetrics and women’s health

Global Strategies is a California-based nonprofit organization that empowers communities in the most neglected areas of the world to improve the lives of women and children through healthcare. The inspiration for NoviGuide came from the organization's programs and partners in the eastern Congo

Founded 1999 by Dr. Arthur Ammann, merged in 2014 with International Pediatric Outreach Project founded by Dr. Theodore Ruel and Dr. Sadath Sayeed

Dr. Joshua Bress, MD

828 San Pablo Avenue, Suite 260
Albany, CA 94706
415-451-1814
info@globalstrategies.org

Sabrina Smith
sabrina.smith@globalstrategies.org

• Implementation of a Newborn Clinical Decision Support Software (NoviGuide) in a Rural District Hospital in Eastern Uganda: Feasibility and Acceptability Study

• The utilization of clinical decision support tools to identify neonatal hypothermia and its associated risk factors: A prospective observational study

• What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get Computer-Interpretable Guidelines: The Case of NoviGuide Neonatal

• NoviGuide Takes Flight

• Hands-On Training + Digital Tools = A New Way to Scale Newborn Care

• A New Partnership: Preeclampsia Foundation

• NoviGuide Software Improves Nurses Knowledge and Confidence in Treating Newborns, UCSF/Global Strategies study finds

• Global Strategies Highlighted in World Health Organization Report

• NoviGuide Study to Begin in Uganda

• Chalkboard: Tracking Neonatal Mortality

• Chalkboard: Oxygen Saturation

• NoviGuide Project Page

• NoviGuide Website

• Global Strategies Website

• Sabrina Smith, Director of Communications and Outreach

  sabrina.smith@globalstrategies.org