INTELLIGENT GREEN TECHNOLOGY
where one in four children will not live to age five. Those are all linked, and they are all unacceptable. Being poor should not mean that you have poor healthcare,” says Josh Nesbit, CEO Medic Mobile.
Kikanda Batelemao is a community health worker, referred to locally as a VHT, for Village Health Team. VHTs are the cornerstone of Uganda’ s primary healthcare model for the millions of Ugandans who live outside the country’ s major cities and towns. Just a few years ago, Batelemao would have to travel 35 miles each way, from the tiny hospital in Bwera to the remote mountain communities he serves, to visit his patients and report on their health.
For pregnant women, who are often forced to walk 30 to 50 miles through the densely forested mountains to see a doctor, the situation is particularly dire. A lack of basic education, access to prenatal care, and communications, is what are called the three delays.
But that situation is changing rapidly because of the tools developed by Medic Mobile to help front-line health workers like Batelemao. He carries with him a simple cellphone. It operates on a 2G cellular network, the same as many of his patients, including Florence Mbambu, who is pregnant with her third child. On Batelemao’ s cellphone is an easy-to-use app developed by Medic Mobile that allows him to register and track the progress of Florence’ s pregnancy, communicate reminders to her about her prenatal care and visits to the Bwera Hospital, and monitor her birth outcome.
Instead of having to walk the 35 miles to deliver the information he has collected about the state of Florence Mbambu’ s pregnancy, Batelemao now uses the Medic Mobile app to send a text message, in real time, to the hospital staff. The hospital analyses the data sent by Batelemao and automatically sends him back a text message containing any medical updates he needs, which includes, the news that Florence
The solution is a mobile healthcare management system and runs on a Linuxbased VMware Workstation Player desktop virtualisation platform
Mbambu is due to deliver her baby on a particular date.
Batelemao uses this information to explain to her that she should leave her village for the Bwera Hospital in enough time to safely give birth. Later, the automated medical system will send Batelemao an alert to remind him again when the baby is due.
Josh Nesbit, Medic Mobile’ s CEO, realised that a cellphone could dramatically transform healthcare because it allowed community health workers in remote villages to communicate, in real time, with the rural clinics they served. But there was a technical challenge that needed to be overcome first. The problem was how to deliver the healthcare platform to everyone who needed it.“ We realised that we could not possibly support every deployment,” Nesbit says.“ We needed to make the software radically accessible to any clinic anywhere that needed the tools to be successful.”
The solution Medic Mobile devised was to build a mobile healthcare management system that could be installed in a snap on a mobile phone, and runs on a Linux-based VMware Workstation Player desktop virtualisation platform. It hosts the Medic Mobile software tool kit, a tool kit that combines smart messaging, decision support, easy data gathering and management, and health system analytics. The result is a variation on the concept of software as a service. As Nesbit says, it is instead, software is a service.
The Medic Mobile Dual SIM Card, enables simple cellphones to transmit patient data securely to Medic Mobile cloud servers. Working with VMware, Medic Mobile developed a modified SIM card, often made with a tool as simple as a pair of scissors, that can be inserted into any regular cellphone manufactured after 1992. Medic Mobile calls the device a parallel SIM card. This hardware device is a microcontroller that allows the community health worker to run the Medic Mobile software tool kit apps.
VMware enables the Medic Mobile tool kit to be used in almost any kind of environment, support any language, and work with or without internet connectivity, locally or in the cloud. Medic Mobile also uses the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Extension to automate the delivery of its healthcare apps where internet connectivity makes that possible. VIX allows the Medic Mobile system to automatically send and receive SMS text messages over any cellular Wi-Fi network.
Nesbit explains it as,“ It is not medical innovation. It is a system innovation and a delivery innovation. It is rethinking who is providing care for whom.”
Medic Mobile designed these tools to work on the simplest of mobile platforms: the inexpensive cellphones that are widely available even in the poorest countries of the developing world.
More than 10,000 health workers in 23 countries in Africa and Asia use Medic Mobile’ s tools. These 10,000 health workers care for more than five million people living in the poorest and remotest places on earth. But Nesbit is not satisfied.“ We have really ambitious five year goals,” he says.“ By the year 2020, we want to be supporting 200,000 health workers and improving healthcare for at least 100 million people.”
58 Issue 01 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS