The function and importance of home-based records (HBRs) in immunization service delivery has been described and practical guidelines for HBR design released by the WHO (http://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/routine/homebasedrecords/en/). The annotated bibliography attached here attempted to bring together available literature on home-based records as a form of personal health record supportive of primary health care including literature describing corrective interventions as well as studies demonstrating impact of home-based records on behaviour, knowledge or health service utilization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the existing literature describing interventions to improve the availability, retention and/or appropriate utilization of personal health records, in general, and home-based vaccination records more specifically, continues to mature. General findings that may be of interest follow.
- The literature review found little evidence related to the design of effective home-based records and on effective strategies to improve and/or maintain high levels of availability, retention and appropriate utilization of home-based records in primary health care.
- The few intervention studies that were identified were riddled by unclear evidence and lacking with regards to selection of controls against which intervention groups were compared.
- The review found that while caregiver-centric interventions are becoming more fundamentally accepted as an important approach, to-date only provisional steps have been taken to improve our understanding of how caregivers engage with the home-based records as a part of the primary health care system.
- The lack of a developed business case around home-based records and their potential role in improving the cost effectiveness of child survival interventions such as immunization services may hinder activity to improve widespread adoption and utilization. Among the several identified intervention studies, none included an economic evaluation.
- Attention is needed to explore opportunities on the supply side and potential solutions to supply challenges such as bundling with other commodities in the immunization supply chain and innovative market shaping of design and production systems.
While the available evidence reveals more questions than answers, opportunities abound for developing and implementing innovative solutions to improve the effectiveness and impact of home-based records as a form of personal health record supportive of primary health care.
This bibliography is meant to be a dynamic document that will be updated moving forward. If you are aware of operational research that resides in the peer-review or grey literature that is not noted in the bibliography, please share by way of reply to this posting.
This is an excellent contribution and I thank you for this. There seems to be a lack of good quality evidence on the topic and we have recently engaged into a project (http://1drv.ms/1QXxAk0) to assess the effects on innovative interventions to improve paper-based systems. Although the focus is at health care provider level, I think we may need to consider HBR as well.
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