Asia

Laos — Using GeoChat for aiding communications at the Laos/Thailand border

GeoChat is being tested for group communication; aiding in local coordination and cross border communications around the Lao PDR/Thailand border.

Thailand — Bureau of Epidemiology influenza surveillance system

The Thai Bureau of Epidemiology is using GeoChat as a platform that powers a custom application that sends out mobile alerts and reminders as part of their nationwide influenza-like illness hospital surveillance system in over 900 hospitals. Detecting new strains of influenza, early signs of drug resistance, or off-season rises in influenza-related syndromes can accelerate containment and preparation for a common disease that takes a recurrent toll on the economies of low-income families. Local developers built a system that interacts with GeoChat to reduce costs and reach the required scalability of the system.

Thailand — Chiang Rai surveillance rapid response teams

GeoChat supports communication with Surveillance and Rapid Response Teams (SRRTs), village health volunteers, livestock staff, provincial health staff, and emergency medical response teams. Keeping cross-disciplinary teams sharing information is critical in the surveillance and response to zoonotic diseases, and to make better use of limited resources. Chiang Rai uses GeoChat to support horizontal communication across these ministries and departments and to keep SRRT teams abreast of the situation in the field.

Thailand — Mukdahan Province mobile disease surveillance

GeoChat supports real-time group communication, including the reporting of influenza-like illness (ILI), dengue and other priority diseases, as well as the implementation of containment measures. GeoChat was critical in containing the spread of the severe 2010 dengue outbreak in Thailand; with workers at community, district, and provincial levels reporting structured data twice as fast as the routine protocols and spreading information about response protocols to health workers.

Cambodia — NAVRI animal surveillance system

We are working with the National Veterinary Research Institute (NAVRI) on their animal surveillance system, starting with a new prototype and field evaluation of an automated national animal surveillance system using smartphones. We help them to track event-based data through hotline calls about diseases, using a smartphone tracking system that connects with a database and triggers a field response.

Cambodia — Bokeo Province disease surveillance coordination

Through the MBDS cross border site at the Bokeo Provincial Health Department, GeoChat supports basic communication and coordination among provincial health staff and hospitals — typically information about recent events, reminders of reports and trainings, and requests for information outside routine surveillance.

Cambodia — Quarantine control and international customs mobile reports

The quarantine division under the Cambodian CDC is using GeoChat to share outbreak information and structured reports of incoming people with neighboring countries. Reports are sent weekly by quarantine staff at international border gates, with plans to expand to more regional gates and harbor gates.

Cambodia — Kampot Province — Staff coordination and training using mobiles

GeoChat is supporting information-sharing between operational districts and health centers, as well as other health-focused communication needs. By keeping the district-level staff in the field but connected via their mobiles to their supervisors, they receive formal and informal alerts and information about new disease protocols or events in neighboring provinces. This prepares them to be on high alert for potential outbreaks within their districts.

Cambodia — Outbreak Rapid Response Team coordination

The Cambodian Communicable Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director has been using GeoChat since May 2009 to send updates and information to his Rapid Response Teams (RRT), starting with H1N1 and more recently for a severe diarrhea outbreak. The ability of headquarters to keep field staff informed prepares them to be ‘on the watch’ for certain diseases much earlier than before. In addition, the CDC Deputy Director can more easily communicate with his teams in real time, as he can send an email from his smartphone, which is then disseminated to the RRT’s via their mobile phones, from which they can then reply with questions or engage in chats with each other through GeoChat.

Cambodia — HIV mobile appointment reminders for patients and home-based care

We provided the technology for a project by the NGO Pangaea with the Cambodian Ministry of Health under The National Centre for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STD Control (NCHADS) to build a tool which enables home-based care workers to track and remind HIV/AIDS patients to attend appointments, reducing the number who drop out of treatment. The users are home-based care workers from 7 NGOs who are responsible for managing over 1400 patients that cover 38 (and rapidly growing) different health centers. This system integrates our mobile tools with pre-existing patient databases, involved extensive field design to find an intersection of effectiveness, data privacy, and usability, and was entirely built in the Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh.

Bangladesh — Grameen Rural Education

This is a UNICEF-funded project focused on developing a rural SMS-based educational support tool to help children in remote areas prepare better for national tests. We partnered with Grameen Solutions in Dhaka to co-develop and implement this project. The system integrated Moodle, a popular open-source education content management tool, with GeoChat’s APIs to allow teachers to trigger and monitor multiple choice tests to classes using SMS, have responses saved as if the students had performed Moodle tests, and monitor results from smartphones running MoMo (a mobile Moodle client). We successfully demonstrated the capability of this tool at the UNICEF Conference in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2009.

Mekong Collaboration Program (MCP) — Improving infectious disease surveillance

The overarching goal of the Mekong Collaboration Program (MCP) is to support continuous improvement in prediction, prevention and control of infectious diseases in the Mekong Basin subregion in order to significantly improve the long term health and well-being of local populations.

The MCP strengthens regional surveillance and response systems in Southeast Asia through the development and adoption of collaboration software that makes it easier to work together, identify threats, and respond quickly. We work closely with the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) Network, an innovative regional collaboration between national governments to support cross-border disease information sharing.

Learn more about our support for the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) network.

Open Medical Records System (OpenMRS)

We have worked closely with the electronic medical record system, OpenMRS, predominantly used in Sub-Saharan Africa. We have contributed code and design expertise to the mobile integration of OpenMRS through its messaging modules in order to help it to integrate with multiple systems, including InSTEDD’s Nuntium message hub for scalable and low-cost messaging. In addition, our Innovation Lab in Cambodia is prototyping systems for maternal-transmission of HIV (PMTCT) on OpenMRS for evaluation by the local Ministry of Health; with follow-up plans to do a Khmer translation in 2011.

Additional links/files to more info: http://openmrs.org/