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Research

Uganda: Claim Mobile

HealthyLife is a voucher program that reimburses existing service providers for services rendered. However, service providers are geographically distant, program management is information intensive and errors and other sources of delay affect service provision, quality of care, and payment timeliness. Claim Mobile is a dual web and mobile based platform designed to enable service providers to use mobile phones to submit formerly paper based claims digitally to a web-based application. The web application is additionally designed to cope with Internet infrastructure limitations found in Mbarara, Uganda, and supports asynchronous synchronization between locally and globally available web server, to enable access to claims data even when Internet access may be prohibitively slow or unavailable.

Nigeria: Women’s Emergency Rural Communications and Reliable Electricity (WECARE)

WECARE is a joint project with Laura Stachel (School of Public Health), Christian Casillas (Energy and Resources), Hal Aronson (Solar Schoolhouse), and Drew Sproul (Adax), originally proposed as part of the annual Bears Breaking Boundaries competition.

In this project, we propose to provide solar power not for the whole hospital, but for specific operating rooms, targeting surgical lighting, and communications and diagnostic equipment. The solar equipment has been deployed in Kofan Gayan Municipal Hospital, in Zaria, rural northern Nigeria, and designed to be easily deployed by hospital staff on a daily basis as necessary. Since mobile coverage is inadequate in this area, we have also provided walkie talkies, which are charged during the day, and used for summoning the doctors on call during the night. In collaboration with De Novo Group, WECARE is raising money to pay for additional solar equipment, as well as headlamps for the midwives and doctors to use during obstetric procedures. Laura’s study involves both a baseline evaluation to gather information on patient care prior to the intervention, as well as improvements after the introduction of these services, and monitoring of the
hospital staff’s ability to maintain the deployed equipment.

Ghana: Amita Telemedicine

The Ghana Consultation Network is a distributed web-based social networking application designed for Ghanaian doctors in Ghana and in the United States to use to consult with one another about patients. Modeled on the existing practice of “curbside” consultation, the web site provides a directory service that enables doctors to consult with professional groups, social contacts, referral hospitals, and particular specialties. In addition, we have architected the system with local servers in each of the main participating hospitals, enabling doctors to interact with the application even when their Internet connection may be faulty or slow. The servers then transparently synchronize with each other over the available Internet connection, propagating new cases and responses throughout the network. This project has been done in collaboration with Rowena Luk and Paul Aoki, and has also been incorporated as a non-profit in Canada.