InSTEDD - Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters

Data Part 1: It’s not the technology, it’s about who uses it and how

2012-02-22T10:54:32-08:00

DATA PART 1:
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY, IT’S ABOUT WHO USES IT AND HOW

Often times our work at InSTEDD revolves around projects that require some form of data collection. Typically we help people implement systems that facilitate work and use the relevant data to achieve a specific result. For example, we’ve worked on projects that help potential tuberculosis patients get tested earlier, HIV patients stay on track taking their medicines and tracking down sources of malaria to help eradicate it.

Over the course of working on a variety of projects that require data reporting, we’ve learned many valuable lessons. One such lesson is that the data collection system needs to be directly addressing the issue at hand, and often times the group running the project has to be coached up front in order to design the data collection system that deals with the real problem. In order to properly design a system for collecting data that is actionable, it’s important to understand the why, the who, the when and the context in which the data will be used.

Data for action, or data for data’s sake?

One of the first questions we ask is “why is this data important?” What will change in the world as a result of having it? Can we shift the design towards the outcome we want (the action) and not the means (the data itself)? Framing the discussion with these questions helps many of our partners shift their mindset so that they are better able to design an mHealth solution that supports the desired outcome: healthier people. The world is not Newtonian so bringing to existence a piece of data does not cause an equal corresponding reaction.

You want your data to be great, on time and with little resources

Any project manager with some experience is familiar with the ‘iron triangle’. If you want to deliver a project with certain quality, you can’t change time, scope and resources independently. Changing one will imply changes in the others. You can’t dictate that suddenly the project will deliver twice as much value, without changing the time and resources available.

In data collection a similar trade off happens: there is a tension between collecting data that is:

Timely — data is available quickly after a relevant event
Complete — data comes in from all relevant sources
High Quality — data tells you something happened when it did (it has good sensitivity) and that the data doesn’t tell you something happened when really it didn’t (it has good specificity)

However, there are some correlations worth exploiting when designing your solution as each particular problem set will have different needs and priorities. For example, infectious disease surveillance, polio eradication, reports of pregnant mothers with complications, street violence reports and post-disaster damage assessments all put different emphases on different ‘points’ of the triangle. The trade off is not a matter of the technologies themselves, but rather who uses them and how.

Additional hurdles need to be cleared when dealing with different technologies and their user experiences for collecting data. For example, filling out a 20-field form via SMS is painful. You also can’t send pictures as easily as you can do voice based messaging. Not everyone has a high-quality smartphone that lends itself to collecting highly structured data. People may not have the proper application, training or knowledge required to collect and/or share certain data. Filling in a form is can be a useful mechanism, but it’s important to be aware that the design of the form can influence the data in ways inexperienced people may not have predicted. Asking people the same question in different ways produce worse data. For example:

What symptoms do you have?
Do you have any of these symptoms?
Check all that apply: A, B,C
Do you have symptom A?
Do you have symptom B?
Do you have symptom C?”

We have learned that even a more advanced device which is capable of collecting richer data can produce worse data if the system isn’t designed properly.

Are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

The best strategy is not to rely on a silver bullet approach, or pick the option with the least obvious problems. Rather, it is wiser to create a combination of approaches that create datasets that you can use together. Such as

Create a ‘hotline’ to get some information from the population directly via voice, or with SMS callbacks. For example, this could be a hotline set up for farmers who can report suspicious livestock deaths (which could be an early indicator of an H5N1 outbreak).
Develop a consistent reporting schedule so that those closest to the action on a daily basis are in the habit of regularly reporting what they see. For example, community health workers can report routine and occasional events with more detail, through an SMS or voice reporting system.
Equip a highly-trained team with knowledge and technology to use more advanced technologies to gather rich information from the field. For example, community outreach teams can use smartphones or tablets in the field while they do routine/surprise interviews or unplanned field investigations to that the information collected is sent back to headquarters in real time.
Correlate the field information collected to verified diagnostic reports from reference laboratories validating disease diagnostics. For example, you can relate the information gathered from the community health centers to a larger more complex system to help verify if the diagnosis was correct and the treatment appropriate.

As you see, each data set will be different. Balancing the timeliness, completeness and quality of each solution gives you an opportunity to use the data complement each other. When brought together in the right way, these different information sets create a better picture than each one could independently. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

We have learned many valuable lessons from our work in the field and the above post is by no means an exhaustive list. Our hope is that by sharing some of our experiences from working directly with the ones using our tools, that we will be able to help others improve the quality of their work as well.

Stay tuned for part two of this blog next week…

Rio 2.0 Demo Alley Conference: Building Technologies for Social Impact

2012-02-10T12:03:02-08:00

Rio 2.0 Demo Alley Conference: Building Technologies for Social Impact

Early this month, InSTEDD was fortunate enough to have participated in the USRio+2.0 Demo Alley event held at the Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. Demo Alley, also known as “speed geeking,” follows a similar format as the well known “speed dating” concept where the purpose is to encourage participants to meet a large number of new people and be exposed to a variety of innovative ideas that help bridge the gap between technology and sustainable development. For this event, participants divided into small groups and each group gathered around a small cocktail-like table to view a short five minute presentation put on by a representative of the organization. After those five minutes, the facilitator rang a bell to signal the group rotation to the next table for another demonstration.

Below is the presentation that InSTEDD CEO, Dennis M Israelski, MD, gave during the Rio 2.0 Demo Ally Conference.

Rio 2.0 Demo Alley Presentation

View more presentations from InSTEDD

Below is the transcript from Dr. Israelski’s presentation:

Slide 1: Cover
RIO 2.0 DEMO ALLEY
Building Technologies for Social Impact

Dennis M. Israelski, MD
President & CEO, InSTEDD
Clinical Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine
Feb 2, 2011

Slide 2: About InSTEDD
At InSTEDD we envision a world where communities everywhere continuously improve their health, safety and economic development. To achieve this vision we use a social technical strategy to design and build technologies that can lead to solutions for the most challenging problems of our times.

Slide 3: About InSTEDD iLabs featuring the iLab Southeast Asia
InSTEDD’s unique approach has led to the creation of regional Innovation Laboratories also known as iLabs. These are regional assets that support human-centered design and development of technology for long-term social impact. We believe this approach will lead to creative solutions that are locally owned and led. The successful iLab will achieve a triple bottom line of 1) building local capacity 2) maximizing social impact and 3) investing in economic sustainability.

InSTEDD’s iLab Southeast Asia, located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was started in 2008 to support the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) Network; this is a diplomatic pact among 6 Ministries of Health to collaborate on surveillance and response in The Mekong Basin sub region of Southeast Asia—considered a “hot zone” for emerging diseases. InSTEDD’s work with the MBDS resulted in the development of a suite of collaboration tools for early detection, response to disease outbreaks. (e.g., Geochat, Nuntium, Veeglio).

Slide 4–6: Examples

One example of how the InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia is supporting public health work is through the Malaria Day 0 project. This project represents a partnership of the Ministry of Health’s National Malaria Center, an NGO known as the Malaria Consortium, and the largest telecommunication company in Cambodia. The objective of the pilot project was to build a scalable system for the alerting of malaria infections at the time of diagnosis.

The iLab Southeast Asia team designed and built a system to host reliable data sharing among the key stakeholders to support activities required to meet the National goal for the elimination of Malaria in Cambodia by 2025. It all happens real-time with customized alert text messages being sent by health centers and village health workers simultaneously to the operational district malaria supervisor, the provincial health department and national malaria elimination program.

The system was designed and built by the iLab Southeast Asia staff in less than four months and is currently up and running in 4 operational districts (represents 40 villages and 52 health centers) . The system has completely met the requirements of a 17 step series of end user stories. The system is fully capable of being scaled nationally.

And there is more– Clear visualization of the terrain improves the follow-up of Day Zero infections and will make it possible to better carry out investigations focused on improving epidemiology and entomology.

Slide 7: InSTEDD’s Modern Toolkit
Based on years of experience in human design in some of the most remote and resource constrained places around the world, we have created a flexible, diverse and scalable suite of tools that can be used independently or can be fully integrated. In addition the functionality of these reusable and open source tools can all be extended to multiple problem areas within health (i.e. improvement in achieving the Millenium Development Goals 4, 5, and 6) and other domains to address some of the greatest challenges of our time.

Please see our website to see our suite of tools in more detail.

Slide 8: Closing

Here we have briefly overviewed InSTEDD’s approach to fostering local innovation that can lead to sustainable solutions that address some of the most vexing challenges in Global Health. It’s an exciting time in history where the power of technology can be used to address the greatest threats to communities everywhere. We stand ready and able to assist partners to meet that challenge. Our contact information and materials are available, so please reach out to us if you believe we can be of assistance.

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Catalyst for Innovation: How a simple toilet paper roll led to the creation of the Reporting Wheel

2012-02-06T20:08:09-08:00

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Catalyst for Innovation
How a simple toilet paper roll led to the creation of the Reporting Wheel

An important aspect of InSTEDD’s work is that we work with the people who will actually be using the tools we create every step of the way. We don’t build anything in isolation and we involve the end-users every step of the way. When we spoke to the people at these rural health centers, we encountered a number of issues that we had to find creative solutions to work around. For a detailed look into how we overcame these challenges to develop the Reporting Wheel, please read the blog post “IT without Software” here.

Back in mid 2009, part of the InSTEDD team went to Southeast Asia to work with some rural community health workers in order to create a simple, fast and easy way for them to share information about disease instances at their health centers. Disease instances would include things such as the disease type, the age of the person who was sick, the date of when they fell ill and so on. The information needed to be shared in a somewhat structured way so that the health workers higher up the information hierarchy could easily be able to tell when there was a problem. We needed to help them find a way to “compare apples and apples”, not apples and mangoes.

Below is a short reflection by Adrian Romero, one of the developers who created one of the first prototypes for what later became the Reporting Wheel.

I took a trip to the iLab Southeast Asia in 2010 to help identify opportunities for technology to support public health workers in Southeast Asia. One of the projects I began working on was the Reporting Wheel. Now, when I think of technology, I tend to think of a physical electrical device. Unfortunately, the technology that I’m used to back home is not as prevalent and widely used in places like the remote villages of Thailand and Cambodia. With this in mind, I began to wonder what other types of devices could be used to encode a specific set of values, such as in disease reporting.

As I tossed this idea around to others at InSTEDD, we began to build some momentum behind designing a non-electrical device that could be used to help the health workers who had such limited access to technology. We knew that we needed to create some sort of device that:

1) can be made a home with common household materials

2) was small enough to be easily carried around by a person

3) was effective at encoding potentially lots of values

4) was extremely simple and easy to use

At home, later that evening, I was stuck by an idea. What if I could make a device from two concentric cylinders, where the outer cylinder would display values through a small windows so that you could see the codes labelled on the inner cylinder? People would rotate the outer cylinder in order to choose which data to report, revealing the code through the display windows.

The potential for this idea was tremendous. I got so excited that I rushed around my apartment trying to find materials to build the first protoype. Less than 10 minutes later with nothing more than a couple of empty toilet paper rolls, a pair of scissors and a pen, I was able to create the first prototype of what later evolved into the Reporting Wheel.

Although the Reporting Wheel 1.0 wasn’t very impressive to look at, it represented something much bigger than the sum of its parts. The most important thing about this experience was the fact that all you needed to create innovative solutions was a good idea and the willingness to try something unexpected. Ideas are easy to come by, but the iLabs provide a great way to try them out and see what works and what doesn’t faster than anything else we’ve seen.

To learn more about how InSTEDD developed the Reporting Wheel, please read this blog post.

To watch a short video on how to assemble your own Reporting Wheel, please watch here.

To get started making your own Reporting Wheel, please continue here.

Part 2: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”

2012-02-02T11:17:25-08:00

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know
What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It

PART 2: The Journey

(For part one, click here)

How to Scale 10x Overnight

Part of the challenge of scaling technologies that use SMS text messaging is how quickly the costs adds up. With this in mind, we knew that in order to reach large numbers of people, we had to develop relationships with mobile operators that could help us keep our costs low. Reluctant at first, always business-savvy, and initially tough negotiators, we built strong relationships with supportive mobile operators. With the support of these mobile operators, InSTEDD could effectively scale from 5 to 500000 people overnight! This meant that with the proper system, you could share what you knew instantly, in real time with the right people who could then take action to mitigate the potential damages.

A New Approach to Working Together

By the time InSTEDD reached 2-years-old, we had accomplished more than anyone thought possible. We had a mature team that knew how to work together in an agile and efficient way and we had made deals with mobile operators and aggregators to help us scale. But most importantly, our iLabs had the full capacity to create, deploy and support a range of tools to help us achieve our mission. The entire team was deeply committed to cultivating a radical shift in how technologies were created. We believed that the design and development of technologies should happen in and by the communities they are meant to serve. Using this approach, the technology was lean, modular, simple, modern, and most importantly, useful. We would work the people who would actually be using the tools, in flexible and iterative ways that showed results in weeks instead of months or years. Yet with all its promise, this was a novel concept that was hard to grasp for people who were used to work in other ways. Many didn’t believe that we could deliver something so fast and cheaply… unless, of course, it wasn’t very good. Few people had the first-hand experience that the closer you are to the problem, the more focused the solution becomes.

Gaining Momentum

The proof that this method was working kept accumulating, and eventually a watershed movement happened as more and more government groups and NGOs approached InSTEDD with the belief that with good, local design, technology would help them achieve their social goals. Since the design was done bottom up, we had government users — not your typical first adopters — choosing to use tools despite them not being mandated officially to do so and without bogus financial incentives. They used the tools because they truly believed they were useful. Since we built things as modular and open source services, local developers stepped up, independently, to build new solutions for hospitals, NGOs and communities. They were able to develop something useful in a matter of weeks– with capabilities that high-income countries would spend millions of dollars on! Due of our relationship with mobile operators, we could aggregate business arrangements and rapidly scale tools from tens to thousands of users…with no extra work.

Haiti Earthquake of 2010

Another pivotal point for InSTEDD came right after the Haiti earthquake of 2010. Our modular architecture, ability to connect with mobile operators and scale quickly as well as our deep-held belief that data needs to flow through fundamental standards, allowed us to deploy an emergency information system to help the relief efforts. The Emergency Information System (EIS) that we developed for Thomson Reuters Foundation supported the flow of a million text messages that aided the relief efforts. As the Haitians were text messaging in their needs, that information was crowd sourced and visualized in other tools of the larger relief ecosystem to help identify what was needed and where. And to achieve even more impact, EIS was used to send messages back to the survivors with useful information to aid their recovery. You can read a project description on our website, watch a video or read a blog post for more information on our work in Haiti.

The Global Community

Since our tools are open source and can be used from any location, we saw that people from New York to Bahrain had discovered that when you design for a constrained environment, the result is simple enough that it’s applicable anywhere else, and ready to roll as soon as the need appears. We intentionally combined our humanitarian mission with smart business acumen so that we could set our first iLab on track to scale and become a financially independent social enterprise. You can read more about our iLabs and that trajectory here.

Today, new applications are designed every day in our two iLabs that help people treat, manage and prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and more. Our tools support the rapid reporting of infectious diseases by sending alerts upwards, downwards, and horizontally, therefore stopping outbreaks before the rest of the world even hears about them. They are used to track information after earthquakes, manage scarce supplies in rural areas, and send disease specific reminders to patients to help them stay healthy. These applications are cost effective, scalable and can be rapidly assembled with the open toolkit we’ve been growing over the years. All of this is done with the context specific needs of the users leading every step of the way.

iLabs: Bridging the Gap Between Society and Technology

Part of the reason why many development projects ultimately fail is because there is a huge, constantly changing, gap between the needs of the people and what was created by the NGO. We knew the intersection between society’s needs and technology is was where the “rubber hit the road” and where we needed to be. With this socio-technical approach in mind, we went straight to the communities themselves and developed the concept for local innovation labs, aka iLabs.

In 2007, InSTEDD launched the first iLab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to target issues affecting the Mekong Basin region. Since its inception, we’ve worked with the Cambodian Communicable Disease Control to strengthen the agency’s internal communications, we’ve worked with the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STD (NCHADS) to develop an appointment reminder system as an extension to their current patient information system.

In April of 2011, we officially launched our second innovation lab. The iLab Latin America was born from our partnership with Manas, a Buenos Aires-based software development and consulting firm that we had already been working with on InSTEDD projects all over the world. Their goal would be to create a center for technological innovation tailored to the Latin American region’s unique needs.

Currently, we are helping the design of our third iLab. What’s even more exciting than opening more iLabs is that parts of our model are being applied all over the world. From Kenya to Liberia and beyond, people are taking action towards creating this sort of innovative environment. The magic of the iLabs can be seen in the faces of those that work there, those that support them, and more importantly those that benefit from their work.

It turned out that by exploring what technologies would help “early detection and early response”, we discovered something much larger. We found a way to continuously evolve, create, recombine and scale the impact of our tools while staying true to the need and keeping our costs low. Metaphorically speaking, we had set out to find gold, and ended up with an alchemist’s recipe, crucible, and lab for producing it. Yet, despite our important discoveries, there is no magic solution.

The challenge is still out there. Millions of dollars are wasted every year on technologies don’t solve the problems at hand, are isolated into silos and keep important data away from the people that really need it. Still today, tools are built with an inherent design that empowers its administrators to fulfill their own needs– at the expense of the needs of the communities. The media will continue to highlight and repeat the flashy, sensational development stories, making it that much harder for the work to tell what’s really making an impact. We are committed to having an real social impact and are creating a team to focus exclusively on research and evaluation. The intent is to have better research that will help discover what has worked and discard what hasn’t based on evidence. Since InSTEDD really helps other groups and agencies do their work; we will have to work with the willing — sometimes folks are too eager to dismiss or hype up the impact of technology based on belief.

A Better World

We all want this world to be better — for ourselves, our families and that rapidly translates to everyone. The evidence is all around us that digital technology is the facilitator of a new ‘age’ — just as stone and iron facilitated new ages, not that long ago. We have just taken our first primitive steps down this new road.

This task is larger than any single organization can achieve. The good news is that each and everyone of us can play a role in ‘changing the world’. If you are reading this there is a high chance you are engaged and can offer support moving forward. Help us in bringing the power of digital technologies to where they make the most difference. We envision a world where people are healthy, productive, kind and creative. We strive to ensure that they are safe when the unexpected strikes or as an unknown future slowly thunders their way. We seek to support the development of a smarter and compassionate future, with well-designed technology that serves the ones in need.

Part 1: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”

2012-01-24T16:30:04-08:00

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know
What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It

PART 1: The Realization

Our TED Prize Beginnings
InSTEDD was created from a TED prize with a single vision. In his acceptance speech, Larry Brilliant said:

“My TED wish is for you to help build a global system,an early-warning system, to protect us against humanity’s worst nightmares. So instead of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it. Instead of industrial accidents like oil spills or the catastrophe in Bhopal, we find them, and we respond to them. Instead of famine, hidden until it is too late, we detect it, and we respond. And instead of a system, which is owned by a government and hidden in the bowels of government, let’s build an early detection system that’s freely available to anyone in the world in their own language.“ (full talk here)

The “early warning/early response” mantra that Dr. Brilliant repeated throughout his speech was the core idea that InSTEDD was built upon. In order to really save lives and keep people healthy, we needed to act as a global community to advance our thinking on how to create a system that taps into both the importance of local knowledge and the power of technology.

The founder build an experienced, world-class team to move InSTEDD forward. The world of bio surveillance and disease detection was no mystery to this team. Whether it was simple data reports or complex phylogenetic analysis, InSTEDD’s experts knew how it all fit together. Yet there was still a huge missing piece that had to be found.

Water Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink
There were already many early warning systems out there, but the warnings still weren’t coming early enough. There were many analyst groups with powerful tools and lots of information, yet they seemed to be cut off from what was being experienced across the globe in the communities that were suffering. There was something more that needed to happen, and it wasn’t about adding more dots on maps.

Experience had taught us an important lesson — if you don’t go, you don’t know. While going to the source is important, individual knowledge is not enough. Everyone at InSTEDD had extensive careers and had developed domain expertise as they worked around the world, but what was really needed was to look at things from a unified, not just domain specific, perspective. The world had to be experienced through social and technical lenses simultaneously. There were plenty of data reporting technologies that people didn’t use — and didn’t want to use. Why? There were plenty of lives to save if the right people shared what they knew, at the right time, and acted together. What was getting in the way? That was the first problem we needed to explore.

A New Approach to Technology
While we were striving to understand the behavior patterns and real motivations of people living in vulnerable communities, a wide variety of seemingly helpful technologies continued to pop up all around us. At first, many of these new technologies seemed to avoid the obstacles we were observing in the field, yet after time all of them ended up in failure. Why did this keep happening? Was the big issue putting forms on phones? Maybe, yet, not really. Was the final solution recording information on to a map for the connected world to see? Well, not quite, the communities we worked in kept telling us again and again. There was something subtle yet critical just under the surface. Early warning and response, and its outcome — healthier people– would never be possible without a cross disciplinary course of action.

Our diversified global team was not just spending time in the communities we were hoping to serve, but were born out of them. It was the local experience that taught us a clear lesson again and again. Technology could serve people and their health, but something had to be changed about the way it was being developed. We knew that a new approach was necessary. And that was exactly what we set out to create.

Making Information Actionable
A wise man once said “teaching is reminding people of what they already know”, and that message instantly resonated with us. The challenge was to identify what people already knew and use the power of technology to bring that information together to make it tangible, operational, workable and most importantly, actionable.

Focusing on this would be a departure from the “early warning, early response” founding idea, but we were willing to expand our vision to strive towards creating a precedent for using technologies to best serve our global community. The challenge seemed huge, but we knew this was the value that InSTEDD needed to strive for.

Change is never easy, and our change in course was no exception. One of the most critical issues was the complexity of working as a non-profit and being dependent on the traditional structure of grants. Few grant makers are thrilled when their grant recipients don’t do exactly what was assumed up front. Fortunately for us, we had allies at Google.org, the Rockefeller Foundation and more who with an appropriate balance of skepticism and optimism gave us free reign to act on our intuitions and observations. That gave us both the motivation and flexibility to reach out to the most remote places where people had never even heard the word “Google” or “TED”. let alone know how to use the technologies we take for granted in the developed world. We knew had it in us to deliver results, but this was a tall order. There was nothing else to do but hit the ground running.

The Importance of Personal Design in the Mobile Technology Revolution
Mobile technologies present an unprecedented opportunity to improve health, safety and development. We are living in a world where nearly everyone alive has access to a mobile phone. In fact, more people in the world have access to cell phones than they do toothbrushes. Within this context, the global communication possibilities are endless.

While access to personal technologies such as the mobile phone is moving in the right direction, we must not forget how important the design aspect is in making these tools valuable and supportive of a healthier world. Personal technology requires personalized design; and no mobile health solution we had come across was approaching design from this angle, especially in the developing world. We found the skeletons of multiple tools in old PCs around rural clinics. Even more disturbingly, we saw example after example of tools used only under perverse incentive schemes, including paying individuals each time they used the system. These Frankensteins on life support were the best experience many of the people we talked to had with technology, which explained why we kept being turned away. We heard things like “You mean you can have something up and running in weeks? Impossible!” or “There is no way our rural users will send these reports. The last project paid every user fifty cents every time they send something, so they sent gibberish daily. If you want better information, you need to pay them better!” We talked to the people who would be using the tools to find out what would incentivize them to report data. We found out who was the data for and how would it help them? We learned how information was flowing so we could know when these rural health workers would find out if a neighboring village was getting sick. We knew progress could be made only if we put these people at the center of our world, and started creating technology with them, not just for them.

We knew we were fighting an uphill battle. We also knew that if we could engage people with incentives more meaningful than just money, then the impact of this work would be huge. So we stayed the course.

Continue on to Part 2 here.

2011 Reflections: Technologies, iLabs and Accolades

2012-01-02T17:07:30-08:00

It has been quite the year for our team here at InSTEDD and our Innovation Labs in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As we prepare to enter the year ahead we wanted to take a moment to look back over a few of our highlights from 2011.

Presented: TEDx Phnom Penh

In February, Channe Suy, Product Manager at iLab Southeast Asia gave an inspiring talk at TEDx Phnom Penh about how we can create sustainable solutions to improve our future by building the capacity of local communities through knowledge sharing. This is one of our guiding principles and Channe was able to share about our work in capacity building in Southeast Asia though the iLab.

Launched: iLab Latin America

A few months later in April we officially launched our second innovation lab! iLab Latin America was born from our partnership with Manas, a Buenos Aires-based software development and consulting firm that we had already been working with on InSTEDD projects all over the world. Their goal would be to create a center for technological innovation tailored to the region’s unique needs.

Eliminating Malaria: Malaria Day Zero Collaboration

August was a busy month for iLab Southeast Asia. First came the trainings for health care workers in the Kampot province of Cambodia on the Malaria Day Zero web application with SMS text messaging for reporting of malaria cases. Village health care workers were also trained on the system and provided with a solar cell and mobile phone in order to employ the reporting system. Also in August, iLab Southeast Asia set out to cut down on the current time of 1–2 weeks for obtaining TB test results. And thus the Lab Result Alert System was developed.

Watchfire: A Collaboration with The Red Cross and Cisco

As October rolled around, we were awarded a seed grant from Cisco Systems for the development of a program to support shared safety, self reliance and situational awareness during a public crisis in the Bay Area. For this project, we worked with the Red Cross to design, develop and test an emergency response team assembly tool called Watchfire.

Winner: TrueBites wins the Ashoka Changemakers Citizen Media Competition

In November we were honored to be chosen as a finalist in the Ashoka Changemakers Citizen Media competition. The iLab Latin America’s idea was for a new kind of news where information is broken into small bites and then all those bites are brought together to create a multi-perspective story. Thanks to all those who supported us with their votes, the idea for TrueBites was one of four winners!

Released: New Free and Open Source Tools

Throughout 2011, we released several new technologies. They are all not only free and open source but also can be combined with our other technologies to develop integrated systems and individualized programs to support a multitude of global health initiatives.

Pollit is a real-time feedback tool that lets you collect status updates, opinions and more all via mobile phones.

Remindem lets you set up a schedule of tips, reminders or messages that will be sent via SMS messages to list subscribers. Like all of our tools, they can be used individually or paired with other tools to create more complete solutions.

Verboice, which transcends language and literacy barriers because it allows anyone to create and run applications that interact via voice. This allows your users to listen and record messages in their own language and dialect. Verboice was also the system that Baby Monitor- a mobile application that we developed for the Population Council.

Verboice is also the foundation for Watchfire, the emergency response team assembly tool we developed for the Bay Area Red Cross with funding from Cisco.

These are just a few of our technologies and highlights from 2011. But we couldn’t have done it without our community’s continued support. Thank you from all of us for supporting us this past year with your donations, your enthusiasm and your kind words in blogs, articles and social media. We are looking forward to the challenges and triumphs that await us all in 2012 and to moving closer to our vision of a world where communities everywhere design and use technology to continuously improve their health, safety and development.

In Her Own Words: Channe Suy Attends OpenMRS Implementers Meeting

2011-12-20T12:58:06-08:00

This past October, Channe Suy, product manger at iLab Southeast Asia traveled to Rwanda to participate in the OpenMRS community’s annual Implementers Meeting for five days of collaboration, sharing of implementation experiences and working together to improve OpenMRS. Channe was invited to the conference because the iLab Southeast Asia and InSTEDD have worked closely with the OpenMRS system, contributing code and design expertise for the mobile integration of medical records. Additionally, in partnership with the Ministry of Health Cambodia, the iLab Southeast Asia is prototyping systems addressing maternal-transmission of HIV on the OpenMRS system. Channe addressed how iLab Southeast Asia was using OpenMRS and the similarities between Rwanda and Cambodia in her conference talk.

It is my first time to attend the OpenMRS conference. The event took place in Kigali, Rwanda. Rwanda is a beautiful hilly country area with perfect climate and warm smile of people. I felt very connected in some way as the country where I am from also had dark history of genocide as in Rwanda.

The meeting provided me opportunity to meet with interesting people from different part of the world who work on health information system, typically on OpenMRS. Participants from Cambodia in that meeting were Dr.Chamnan from NCHADs, Dr.Sambath and Mr.Roth from URC, and me from InSTEDD iLab Phnom Penh.

It gave me such a surprise to see an African country moving ahead even far better than some countries in Asia with regard to electronic medical record system. I think Cambodia itself has more to learn from the existing implementation of medical record system from Africa. The cultures are different but we are developing countries and the context of people in terms of economic scale are very similar.

NGOs such as Jembi, Ampath, PIH and Baobab have demonstrated very good success examples of OpenMRS implementation. OpenMRS has a very strong community and even African countries have the local capacity to be able to do customization of the tool base to their specific needs. One example that was demonstrated during the meeting, there was implementation of OpenMRS with touch screen and mobile data collection and reporting.

I went on a site visit at PIH site, Rwinkwavu Hospital, on the third day of the event. At the primary care registration counter the health staff used a touch screen system which is base on OpenMRS. PIH has been deploying this system for 9 months and the catchment population coverage has registered about 90%. This is very impressive! The hospital lab uses lab module of OpenMRS. Health insurance was introduced to this hospital with multiple categories based on each person’s living condition. Majority is in the middle category which the insurance cost them $USD 3–4 annually.

Thanks to the OpenMRS organizer, I like the way the event was organized, especially the “unconference” style. Another cool part was the Lightning Talk sessions where each presenter was given only 5 minutes. I also gave a lightning talk on the experience and work of the iLab Phnom Penh.

I look forward to the next OpenMRS meeting which will be in Asia… I wish that country could be Cambodia!

Dynamic Resource Mapping

2011-12-14T22:38:42-08:00

iLab team started working on project “Dynamic Resource Mapping” . This project is aim to provide mapping of any facility or resource and be able to update and query the resource availability via SMS, Web interface. The scope of this project is:Read more »

TB Result Alert System TOT & HC Pilot training

2011-12-14T22:32:37-08:00

The current turnaround time for Health Center to submit smear to laboratory and gettingresult back is within 1-2 weeks. The delay of receiving lab result can be developedto 2 problems.

Video: How ‘Watchfire’ Helps the Red Cross

2011-12-14T10:27:22-08:00

“From the time we’re notified to when we’re on the scene is less than 1 hour… One of the first steps we need to take is initiating our volunteers to get out into the field. How do we communicate that?”

- Al Mallamo — Disaster Services Chair, Bay Area Chapter of the American Red Cross

THE TOOL

With this context in mind, we worked with the American Red Cross to develop a tool that would help them get their volunteers on the disaster response scene as quickly, smoothly and efficiently as possible. Since the clock is ticking, every moment counts. Watchfire is a simple and yet powerful system that initiates and tracks the process of building a volunteer response team with people who are geographically close to each other through phone calls and text message.

The below video is a short 3 minute overview of how Watchfire was developed and the impact the Red Cross believes it will have:

THE PROJECT OVERVIEW

In October of 2010, Cisco awarded a seed grant to InSTEDD for the development of technology designed to improve the resilience of community-level disaster response. This grant was for the development of a program to support shared safety, self reliance and situational awareness during a public crisis in the Bay Area.

In 2011, InSTEDD designed, developed, and pilot tested a tool, called Watchfire, to help the American Red Cross(ARC) improve their community level disaster response in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working closely with the ARC on a needs assessment, we learned that their highest priority was improving the speed and coordination of ARC’s Disaster Action Teams (DATs). Using an agile development process that involved the ARC in the cycle of building better and better technical solutions, we developed Watchfire, a simple and yet powerful system that initiates and tracks the process of building a volunteer response team with people who are geographically close to each other through phone calls and text messages.

THE PROCESS

For a more detailed look into the process, please read the blog post “Live recruiting of volunteers through phone calls and text messages”.

InSTEDD - Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters

Data Part 1: It’s not the technology, it’s about who uses it and how

Data for action, or data for data’s sake?

You want your data to be great, on time and with little resources

Are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

Rio 2.0 Demo Alley Conference: Building Technologies for Social Impact

Below is the transcript from Dr. Israelski’s presentation:

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Catalyst for Innovation: How a simple toilet paper roll led to the creation of the Reporting Wheel

Part 2: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t KnowWhat We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It

PART 2: The Journey

How to Scale 10x Overnight

A New Approach to Working Together

Gaining Momentum

Haiti Earthquake of 2010

The Global Community

iLabs: Bridging the Gap Between Society and Technology

A Better World

Part 1: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t KnowWhat We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It

PART 1: The Realization

2011 Reflections: Technologies, iLabs and Accolades

In Her Own Words: Channe Suy Attends OpenMRS Implementers Meeting

Dynamic Resource Mapping

TB Result Alert System TOT & HC Pilot training

Video: How ‘Watchfire’ Helps the Red Cross

“From the time we’re notified to when we’re on the scene is less than 1 hour… One of the first steps we need to take is initiating our volunteers to get out into the field. How do we communicate that?”

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know
What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It

If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know
What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It