There are only a few things I enjoy more than solving interesting, intractable problems using cool technology. One of them is sharing appropriate technologies in a way that enables people all over the world to solve their own problems. This focus on tools for the world, rather than “solutions” for a small client list, is a huge part of our impact model. With a full time staff of just four people, we are able to support projects in quite a few countries. Our staff have been in charge of only a minority of these projects; most of them are coordinated by innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who have found us and decided that they can implement our tools in their own organization or community. We support them remotely via conference calls, email, etc., but too frequently we only hear from people when they run into problems. We have found it very difficult to stay in touch with projects that are up and running. Our old word documents and PDFs about each project have started to pile up but we lack a basic, uniform data set that is up to date and comprehensive of all projects. So we’re undertaking a project census and we hope you will help us.

The deal for our clients:
We’ll continue to offer loads of free advice and software to anyone who will keep in touch about where, when, and how they are using it. This form is short – it should only take 10-15 minutes – and we want you to think of it both as a thank you to Medic and as a payment for our services.

Our ability to fundraise depends on having good data about our end users, so I’m serious when I say that completing this questionnaire is as important as providing payment for goods received. Nadim (Medic’s Research Director) and I have tried to make it brief and easy, so we hope you will be able to complete it quickly and painlessly.

Thank you in advance to everyone who takes the time to fill out this form! For those of you who are not actively working on a project, we appreciate your help reminding the rest of the community to check out the form.

cheers
Isaac

Find the form at http://medic.frontlinesms.com/implementations

I am very excited to announce that today we are releasing a public beta of PatientView, our software for managing patient information anywhere there’s a mobile signal. We’ve been working on it for over a year and are downright ecstatic to see it reach this point and go out ‘on its own’ so to speak. Below, you’ll find a video tour and a few screenshots of the software:

PatientView login

Searching for a patient

Patient's record

PatientView administration

B is for Beta and for Bugs

We’re releasing PatientView as ‘Beta’ because it’s not yet ready for production use. We ask that you help us change that by reporting any bugs that you may find to bugs@medic.frontlinesms.com. Please tell us what you did just before the error, what you expected to happen, what happened instead, and describe any error messages that popped up. Additionally, if you have ideas for PatientView that aren’t bugs, but fall more in the ‘feature request’ category, then please send those in an email to ideas@medic.frontlinesms.com

How To Install & Run PatientView

1) Prerequisites – Make sure that you have at least Java 1.5 installed. If you don’t know for sure if you have Java or what version it is, you can execute the command ‘java -version’ in the terminal and it will tell you what you need to know. If you need to get Java, go here to download the Java Runtime Environment 6.0.

2) Go here and download the PatientView version that’s right for your computer. If you’re a Mac user, you’ll want the .dmg, if you’re a Windows user, you want the one labelled ‘Windows’, and if you’re a Linux user you should pick the version that matches your architecture (i686/ia64/x86_64). To find your processor architecture on Linux, execute the command ‘uname -p’ in the terminal.

3) If you’ve run FrontlineSMS in the past and want to continue running your old FrontlineSMS instance in the future then you should save your FrontlineSMS properties folder. This folder is located in your user directory/FrontlineSMS, and is called ‘properties’. Just rename it something that you’ll remember so that when you want to switch back, you can just re-rename it ‘properties’ again, and everything will be back to normal.

4) Run PatientView. There are slightly different instructions for each system:

Mac – It’s a .dmg, so it’s pretty straightforward. Just click on the FrontlineSMS icon inside the mounted .dmg folder.

Windows – unzip the folder and double click ‘FrontlineSMS.bat’.

Linux – unzip the folder and double click ‘FrontlineSMS.sh’

And that’s it! If you’re having trouble, please don’t hesitate to ask the implementer’s list by emailing your questions, what you’ve tried, and what errors you’re seeing to frontline-implementers@googlegroups.com.

By the way, we’re hiring

Software developers with enthusiasm for our cause should say hello and send a resume to jobs@medic.frontlinesms.com.

- Dieterich -

We are excited to announce that the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation is supporting FrontlineSMS:Medic’s innovation team with a $25,000 grant. This generous donation will fast-track development of new projects set to empower health workers and improve healthcare in low-resource settings around the world.

Stay tuned for updates!

Josh and the FrontlineSMS:Medic team

Hello friends,

I write today with excellent news. We are thrilled to announce that The Mulago Foundation is supporting FrontlineSMS:Medic with a catalyst grant. Thanks to this support, I am now full time as Lead Developer, responsible for software design, development and testing. This is exciting because I’ve been chained to other activites for the past year or so and have been spoiling for a chance to really dig in to all the projects that Medic has going.

Last year we gave the community a first taste of Patient View, our extension of FrontlineSMS that allows clinics to manage their remote workers and patients as well as the day-to-day operations at the clinic itself. Most recently, an alpha version of Patient View was on display at the Global Health Information Forum in Bangkok. While this was a good start, we have much, much more planned for this year, and I’d like to give you a rough outline of what the software devs have in store:

Release of Patient View

With a filled-out featureset including user interface improvements, internationalization,  lost-to-followup and adherence monitoring, improved charting, appointment scheduling, calendar tools, auto-topup, and much more, this year will definitely be a good one for Patient View. We are planning on releasing a beta version in February (in just a couple of weeks), and if you would like to participate in that beta testing, feel free to email me at dieterich@medic.frontlinesms.com. After the beta version, we will kickoff the Medic open source community by opening up the Patient View code.

FrontlineSMS & OpenMRS

While we think that Patient View is excellent, it isn’t right for everyone. There are large clinics with huge patient loads that need a solution that can handle their 60,000 patients and all the data that comes with them.  To that end we are working with OpenMRS (openmrs.org), an enterprise-level FOSS medical record, to develop several different featuresets including mobile data collection, SMS alerts, and more.

Mapping with Ushahidi

Ushahidi has created a wonderful platform for mapping, and has recently put their tech in a FrontlineSMS plugin. We plan to use this to add a wide range of mapping features to Patient View. This will allow users to map diseases, workers, resources, or anything that they wish so that they can better manage their time, fuel, and other resources.

Remote Diagnostics with CelloPhone

Andoyan Ozcan at UCLA (http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/) has created a revolutionary system that allows cellular-level images blood to be taken using the camera sensor of a simple camera phone. These images can then be sent via MMS to a remote server where they are analyzed by pattern-matching algorithms, yielding important information like CD4 counts, disease diagnoses, and more. We plan to integrate this technology with Patient View, allowing doctors in the developing world to take full advantage of this incredible new technology. In the settings of many of our clinics, there are no labs to send tests off to, or if there are, getting results is expensive and time consuming. With this new technology, we can have diagnoses in seconds at the cost of an MMS. Now that’s what I call progress!

Personally, I’m super excited about this coming year. These projects all have the potential to change the state of  mHealth in a huge, positive way.

In closing, I’d like to emphasize that Medic is not solely focused on software; we are an organization committed to fostering an open-source software community and making sure these tools make it to those who need them most. With the beginning of our open source community, these plans have the potential to be yours just as much as they are ours. If you want to participate, email us and stay tuned because things are about to get really interesting, really quick.