OpenQRS for mHealth Apps at UNESCO's Tech4Dev 2/2
On Day 3 of UNESCO's Tech4Dev Conference*], we presented on the panel: Strategies for Successful Implementation of mHealth in Low Resource Settings moderated by Walter Karlen. Lisa Stroux shared brilliant work on assuring the quality of sounds for a low cost, mHealth-based ultrasound designed to reduce perinatal mortality in low resource settings. Araya Medhanyie emphasize the importance of addressing community health worker's needs based experience with an mHealth app to address maternal health in Ethiopia. Balwant Godara provided a landscape analysis on mHealth use in infectious disease diagnostics in India. Andrea Beratarrechea MD contributed insights from the implementation of mHealth strategies for lifestyle modification in hypertensive patients in Argentina.
I kicked off the presentation by sharing my perspective on why adoption of health care IT often feels like herding dinosaurs.
Drawing upon my experiences in health care product design and as a clinician in the trenches of medicine, I presented the concept of relation-centered design and a scaffold of ethical considerations to build integrity by design into mhealth apps and devices targeting low income countries.
Ethical Considerations and Relation Centered Design for mHealth Applications from Kate Michi Ettinger
It was exciting to share what we learned when applying the scaffold to a diagnostic tool of Grand Challenges Canada grantee, Walter Karlen. In this pilot, we applied our prototype framework to a mHealth app developed for community health workers to diagnose pneumonia in children in rural South Africa. Walter was our 1st customer/ collaborator to apply our prototype Integrity by Design | OpenQRS framework from the outset of development- kudos to Walter!
Day 3 ended with a fantastic panel moderated by Zach Friedman, Program Director at LIGTT: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies. The health panel featured diverse stakeholder perspectives on "scale" and sustainability for medical devices. [Kudos Zach for a panel featuring women in STEM]
We were thrilled to see the proactive, innovative approach to addressing quality and safety in low resource settings presented by Tiffany Diage from Echelon MDM, an innovative approach to developing local medical device manufacturing capacity in Ethiopia. Referencing our relation-centered design presentation, Karen Pak Oppenheimer of World Health Partners shared a key learning from RHP's work in India was the importance of addressing relationships in product and service design.
One of the closing remarks was the recurring theme of the difficulty of current regulatory approaches and their inappropriateness to the Global South. We have a proposal for an alternative and we look forward to working with our tech4dev colleagues and learning forward to address this issue.
Congratulations to the organizers for an outstanding conference!
*UNESCO’s Technology for Development conference organized by the UNESCO Chair for Sustainable Technology and CODEV at EPFL in Lausanne. The conference theme focused on “What is Essential?” in technology for development. UNESCO Tech4Dev | #t4d2014 on Twitter