FrontlineSMS:Medic – Summer Update
It’s been quite a summer so far for FrontlineSMS:Medic! There are five colleagues now in the field overseeing deployments — Josh, Lucky, and Isaac in Malawi with VillageReach, Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), and St. Gabriel’s Hospital; Nadim in Bangladesh with the Smiling Sunshine Franchise Program; and Nicholas in Rwanda for the Gitwe Hospital. We’re getting good feedback as more clinics and community health workers (CHWs) interface with the system, and learning important lessons regarding logistics. Hundreds of new CHWs have been brought on board this summer and hundreds of man-hours of valuable experience gained.
Back stateside in Oregon, lead developer Dieterich has been hard at work creating PatientView — Medic’s first software module for FrontlineSMS. PatientView will allow folks at the clinics see information about patients, manage the info sent in by the CHW, and much more. The aim is for PatientView to ultimately tie into OpenMRS which is a more robust open source medical record system, which Mugisha is working on this summer. Dieterich’s work has been simply extraordinary — just a couple of months ago the team was swapping ideas back and forth over a drawing mockup of the software, and the progress Dieterich has made blows our minds. I hope to write about some more specific use cases in later posts, but you can see demos of PatientView here.
Things are looking good for Medic to continue its rollout and deployments even as the school year starts up again. Hopefully we’ll have an all hands meeting this fall, which should be awesome. Lucky, Josh, and Nadim are from Stanford, Isaac and Dieterich are from Lewis and Clark University in Oregon, and Nicholas hails from Northwestern; but we’re all finding a way to work together. Boundaries just don’t stop interested people from getting involved.
Subscribe to Medic’s blog or follow it on Twitter and Facebook, and follow any of the team members by clicking on their name in this post. If you have an old phone in a drawer someone, consider recycling it through our Hope Phones campaign — the monetary value salvaged from your old phone can be used to obtain appropriate phones that can be put into the hands of community health workers in sites around the world.