development

Mobilizing Medical Records in Resource Poor Settings

Challenges:

USAID Development 2.0 (2009)

Submitted by danielbachhuber on March 17, 2010 - 6:20pm

10 comments

Mobilizing Medical Records in Resource Poor Settings

Short Project Overview:

We will develop software that enables health workers to utilize electronic medical records [EMR] remotely via SMS. We will use SIM-based mobile phones, and implement the project at clinics that serve more than 65,000 people in Peru and Burundi.

Detailed Project Overview:

Mobilizing the medical record is a high impact opportunity, EMR adoption has direct and well documented health impact. However, EMRs are rarely implemented successfully in poor areas because of hardware that is expensive, unfamiliar, or unavailable locally, lack of internet and hassles associated with data re-entry. These issues can be address by SIM based phones.

EMR will be used more broadly and effectively if more health workers (not just physicians) gather and make use of medical data. Health workers are often out in the field where they do not directly contribute data to EMR.
Data collected off-site is often recorded on paper; it must be entered into a database by a different (more trained with computers) person, in a different place, at a different time. Unnecessary steps increase confusion, reduce efficiency and accuracy.
Patients currently do not remotely report health issues (I'm out of insulin needles, where can I get condoms?). This impeeds data collection in poor areas where transportation to a clinic may be a serious investment and many patients walk. Remote reporting would facilitate preventative medicine.

Our goal is to produce software that can:

Use SIM-based mobile phones. They are cheap, durable, prevalent, require less training and are less likely to make workers a target for theft/mugging (relative to smart phones).
Use OpenMRS, an open source EMR. OpenMRS manages hundreds of thousands of patients records; existing installations will be able to plug and play with our software, increasing our project's potential to scale.
Health workers or patients send data via SMS, it will be added to patient's medical record. Physicians will be notified of urgent situations (a hemorrhaging home-based childbirth), and worker/patient may receive SMS advice from clinician or an automated SMS based on electronic records.
Builds on, smooths interoperability with existing OSS like OpenRosa and Mesh4x.

Data transfer optimized for low-signal environments.

What else have you done in this area?:

The greatest barrier to implementing distributed medical records is adapting organizational practices, not building software. Our development efforts will be put into action because our project was initiated and is being carried out by organizations that provide health care for the poor.

Health Bridges International has helped to develop and operate a clinic and community health care delivery program in the impoverished peri-urban communities of Alto Cayma, Peru.Â The clinic consists of full time medical, dental, nursing, pharmacy and health education staffing.Â In addition, the clinic has outreach workers who act as advocates in the communities (35k people total) to help identify the most marginalized populations and connect them to services.

Village Health Works is dedicated to the principle that all people, including the most oppressed and impoverished, are entitled to the highest standards of health care in their pursuit of happy and productive lives. VHWâ€™s first project is to design, build, and operate a model community health clinic in Kigutu, Burundi. VHW serves about 30k people, regardless of ability to pay.

The primary directors of the project are two students, Isaac Holeman, a co-founder of Squarepeg, a N2Y3 featured project to help people find service and action opportunities on the Internet, and Daniel Bachhuber, the founder of Oregon Direct Action, an organization at the University of Oregon that is developing an open source organizational model for student groups.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here:

Organization supporting your Project, if any:

Village Health Works

Supporting Organization URL:

http://villagehealthworks.org/

City:

Kigutu

Country:

Burundi

Does your Project have financial support?:

Is the impact area of your Project global?:

Yes

If no, what country(s) does it impact?:

Burundi

Peru

Type of expertise needed:

Technical Expertise

Description:

Additional tech development help would be quite nice!

Sustainability (financial) Model:

This project requires only minimal seed funding to get off the ground. Once it is functional, it will be supported by the organizations that use it. These include health care organizations like Village Health Works and Health Bridges International, and open source communities like OpenMRS and OpenROSA.

Additional Project Idea Representative NetSquared User Name:

iholeman

Submitted by danielbachhuber on December 5, 2008 - 3:12am

10 comments

Project Bija

Project URL:

http://www.projectbija.com/index.html

What will change in the world because this Project happens?:

The project will change how we look at the world, thinking spatially and in terms of layered interwoven societal drivers.

With a map as the primary navigation tool users can access information on local, regional, national and international scales about:

1. The challenges;

2. Available resources;

3. Who is working to overcome the challenges; and

4. How 1,2 and 3 can be synergised.

What information will people interact with to make this change?:

The primary interface is a map api - eg google maps.

Divide the map on a country basis. Individual countries can be clicked upon. the second stage will divide those countries into clickable regions and the third stage dividing those regions into clickable local areas. Each scale provides more focus and filter.

Clicking on a country zooms into the country. On the navigation bar are a series of links (Challenges, Resources, Organisations etc. Links open up to further sub links which then lead to information feeds (feeds are either RSS or scrapped using dapper) for that country divided into:

1. Challenges.

2. Resources.

3. Non-Profit Sector.

4. Private Sector.

Zooming into the map allows more detail of filtered results for example, local newspapers, closer detail of which charities and companies are working in the area.

Due to the greater detail required at local level users may log in to the site to add information via a wiki.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?:

I'm a UK lawyer specialising in digital social media so work with many clients in the private and non-profit sectors who use social media. For example, I advise Oxfam on their use of social media and drafted their blogging and social networking policies.

I also lecture at Westminster University and London Southbank University regarding social media law.

I have set up my own websites including a site to sell my surf film. The site is no longer live. Using wordpress some 50,000 people downloaded the film and bought dvds through the site. Users of the site voted on where they wanted a % of profits to go.

I have also volunteered in Central America for environment projects and lived on a Fairtrade banana plantation in Costa Rica for a month for my University Thesis.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here:

Organization Supporting your project, if any:

None confirmed yet but I have close links with Oxfam and would be keen to get others involved.

Does your Project have financial support?:

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?:

Developers.

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources:

www.nrdb.co.uk

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

http://www.imf.org/external/country/

http://apps2.irs.gov/app2/pub78

http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/search.asp?posi...

http://www.developmentgateway.org/cg/index.do

http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?scope=all&edition=d&q=...

http://allafrica.com/

Submitted by anonyone on March 14, 2008 - 1:21pm

1 comment

What the World is Saying: Election 2008

Project URL:

http://www.linktv.org/dearamericanvoter

What will change in the world because this Project happens?:

If the project is successful, American voters will learn the impact that U.S. foreign policy decisions have on people around the world, on a general and personal level. They will also see how U.S. democracy is perceived in contentious countries like Iran and China.

The aim of this project is to expose American voters to the impact that their decisions, and their elected governmentâ€™s decisions, have on people globally, using user generated video, news video, feeds and statistics. U.S. voters will also become aware of how the 2008 U.S. presidential election is being covered by television outlets in other countries. This knowledge will help make voters more aware of the importance of their decision and the empowerment they gain through participation in the democratic process. It will also bring them closer to individuals outside of the U.S. by allowing them to make a personal connection through video dialogue.

The project may be a great first step toward a permanent and growing mashup of international news and reports on a variety of global issues beyond the election. Future iterations of What the World is Saying â€“ Human Rights, Development Aid, the Environment?

What information will people interact with to make this change?:

Link TV has already launched a linear website that allows people to post â€œvideo lettersâ€ about the 2008 U.S. presidential election, with an emphasis on international submissions. Visitors can watch short videos uploaded from all around the world, of people speaking to the camera on diverse issues like aid to Kenya, Burmese autonomy and Americaâ€™s image abroad. They can upload video letters themselves, or leave text and video comments. We envision making these videos more accessible by plotting them on a world map with pinpoints indicating where the videos come from. A concurrent project at Link TV records and logs TV news reports from countries all over the world (Global Pulse). We would like to take as many as 30 world reports covering the U.S. election from countries like China, Russia and Iran, and plot these videos on the map, too, using a different color pinpoint, adding new news reports as the election cycle progresses. These pop-up windows could play the news video, and also have a tab for an RSS feed from the featured broadcaster. Other tabs could have RSS headline feeds for that country from alternative news sources like Global Voices. As a â€œnice-to-haveâ€, it would be interesting to incorporate other statistical details with these video popup balloons, such as country statistics on GDP, poverty level, and (optimistically) broad assessments of U.S. aid and military involvement.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?:

Link TV ( www.linktv.org ) is a non-profit satellite television channel that has been dedicated to cross-border dialogue since its inception over eight years ago. Our programs include news, current affairs, world cinema and documentaries, and we are dedicated to providing a unique perspective on issues and diverse cultures. We recently concluded an online film contest in collaboration with the organization One Nation to promote understanding of the American Muslim community, where users could upload their own videos and voting determined the finalists. Several of our original productions repackage and translate international news for the English-speaking world and our daily Middle Eastern news show, Mosaic, won a Peabody Award for this analysis in 2005. We will have the opportunity to promote this mashup on national television to an audience of millions.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here:

Project RSS Feed:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/dearamericanvoter/videos.rss

Organization Supporting your project, if any:

Link TV

Supporting Organization URL:

http://www.linktv.org/

Does your Project have financial support?:

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?:

Developer help to port information from our browser-based Content Management System, including video tags and videos, onto Google Maps. Ideally we need to create an RSS feed of our Dear American Voter videos. We will be posting select submissions to YouTube also, and if porting from our database isnâ€™t possible, we could use YouTubeâ€™s automatic channel-based RSS feeds instead. We would need to create an RSS feed of the news report videos from our CMS, and associate them with the RSS feed of the relevant broadcaster. This may require adding a new data field to our CMS, depending on how the headline RSS feeds are drawn into the map. We could also have a tab in the news video popups that includes an RSS feed of headlines from Global Voices, a curated international news blog site that provides country specific RSS feeds. Challenges we face: plotting multiple videos to a single country and finding country information in a form that can be imported into the map as a data source.

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources:

Dear American Voter

Global Pulse (edited, NOT the raw reports)

Global Voices RSS

Many others.

Submitted by hannah on March 11, 2008 - 12:07pm