This Thursday at Change Brian DeRenzi will talk about how mobile devices can improve health worker performance. For rural populations living in low-income settings, community health workers (CHWs) are in the best position to provide health information, encourage healthy practices, and be the most accessible point of entry into the national health system. However, CHW programs are difficult to run because of the logistics of supervising a large number of distributed workers. Mobile phones can be used to strengthen community health programs by providing support for improved monitoring and supervision of CHWs. In this talk, we explore how mobile devices can improve health worker performance. We present a system that provides escalating reminders (proactive SMS, reactive SMS, and phone calls from supervisors) to CHWs about upcoming and overdue visits in order to increase the timeliness of visits. The system augments existing CHW programs where the CHWs are using a mobile device to capture and send data from routine home visits. We present an 80-day randomized controlled study showing an 86% decrease in the number of days visits are overdue. In a follow up study lasting 180 days, we show that removing the phone call from the supervisors significantly decreases performance, demonstrating the importance of the escalating step of the reminder system. Through these three studies, we present specific evidence of the ability of mobile devices to improve workforce performance in CHW programs. Brian DeRenzi is a Postdoc in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He just finished his Ph.D. in December from the same department. His B.S. was in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Brian's dissertation work was focused on building mobile technology to support health workers in East Africa, with a primary focus on community health workers in Tanzania. *What:* Brian DeRenzi on how mobile devices can improve health worker performance. *When:* Thursday, February 2nd at Noon *Where:* Paul Allen Center, Room 203