New app gives Thailand’s healthcare chance to go paperless

A doctor using the Family Folder Collector app on an Android pad, collecting information on a member patient. Photo Credit: bangkokpost.com

Thailand’s public health system has developed a mobile app for Android enabled tablet PC’s to monitor and collect household information on patients. The app, called Family Folder Collector (FFC), was developed by a research team at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec).

Nectec researcher Watcharakon Noothong said the application comprises three major programs, including a walking map, genogram (a pictorial display of a patient’s health and family relationships) and Java Health Center Information System (JHCIS) synchronization.

FFC is designed to make life easier for public health workers who collect data on patients and for patients who are on time sensitive treatment schedules and cannot travel to health stations at any given moment for treatment.

The app is free. The only cost to utilize the service is paying for the tablet PC’s which is being covered by the province’s public health office.

Here are some of the features and capabilities of the FFC app:

Google maps shows the exact location and number of households in a given area
Genograms can be displayed
Chronic disease frequency can be color coded on a house-to-house basis
The program can collect and store other vital data, such as a patient’s weight, height, blood pressure and pulse rate, and even calculate a patient’s body mass index (BMI) automatically.
The program provides forms for treatment results, initial symptoms, health recommendations, and health behaviors
Doctors can schedule future appointments with patients
In the near future, the program will also be able to send an SMS to alert patients to get treatment at the health station.

All the collected data is updated and stored on the Android device then synchronized to the JHCIS database server. Public health workers were trained on how to properly input data into the tablet PC’s before pilot testing started. Of a total of 25 districts in the province of Ubon Ratchathani, eight are running the pilot trial of the FFC program, which, in its first phase, covers 123 health stations.

Ubon Ratchathani was chosen as the province since its existing IT infrastructure can accommodate sophisticated ICT’s for healthcare. There are over 1.8 million people in the province, all of whom will be accounted for by health workers using the FFC app.

This do-it-all app is a valuable tool for public health officials and physicians in Thailand. FFC can potentially replace the paper based system of collecting data and monitoring patients in Thailand.

The FFC application can display a genogram, monitor chronic diseases with Google Maps, and locate the house coordinates using a GPS system. Photo Credit: bangkokpost.com

The potential benefits of using this service are bountiful. Patient data will be gathered much easier and will be much harder to lose over time. Doctors can schedule appointments and prescribe treatments without physically seeing patients. Also, analysis of patient data will be faster, more efficient and more accurate.

Thailand may experience a revolution in healthcare if this service lives up to its potential. Currently, each health station has one tablet PC equipped with the program. The FFC application is expected to run throughout the province covering all 346 health stations by 2012.

Furthermore, according to Sinchai Tawwuttanakidgul, director of ICT Centre, Office of the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Public Health, today there are some 45 provinces that are ready to switch from their paper-based system to the FFC mobile application. It sounds like Thailand is ready to experience that revolution soon.

August 11, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Extension Service, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

The Spoken Web: Searching for Farming info by Voice (VIDEO)

The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though v oice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.