Implementing population-based household surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic presented a number of challenges, but it also drove innovation. To ensure standardization during central-level training while limiting the number of people in one room to accommodate physical distancing, we worked with our partner Stattis to create the PHIAcademy (http://academy.stattis.com/). PHIAcademy is an online training package for using the CSPro-based CAPI for household survey procedures. With this, we were able to deliver exactly the same content in the same way, even with field teams spread across 10 different rooms. During survey implementation, we were able to use PHIAcademy to provide refresher training for teams in quarantine as well as in the field when teams had questions about navigating different sections of the survey questionnaire.
Another innovation driven by the COVID-19 pandemic was the PHIA Companion, a mobile symptom screening application that all survey staff used each day to screen for and automatically report symptoms consistent with COVID-19. This application was monitored by the survey management team and triggered isolation, quarantine, and testing for SARS-CoV-2 to mitigate infection risk among teams and between teams and the community.
