Name: 【TED】Soyapi Mumba: Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs (Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs | Soyapi Mumba)
Uploaded: 2018-02-04T15:47:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Like every passionate software engineer out there,

Adverbs of manner

I closely follow technology companies in Silicon Valley,

Adverbs of degree

pretty much the same way soccer fans follow their teams in Europe.

where the landscape is not quite the same.

and a lot of patients visiting understaffed hospitals.

hospitals have been struggling to manage regular HIV treatment records

importing technology systems developed elsewhere has not worked,

that are addressing health care challenges in Malawi.

We designed an electronic health record system

that is used by health care workers while seeing patients.

And in the process we realized that we not only had to design the software,

we had to implement the infrastructure as well.

to comprehensively examine every patient,

so we embedded clinical guidelines within the software

who assist with handling some of the workload.

so we wrote algorithms to handle estimated birthdates

How do we follow up patients living in slums

We used landmarks to approximate their physical addresses.

Malawi had no IDs to uniquely identify patients,

so we had to implement unique patient IDs

on labels that are stuck on personal health booklets

No need to rewrite their personal details

This meant patients, typically mothers with little children on their backs,

had to spend less time waiting to be assisted.

their records can still be pulled by searching with their names.

Now, the way we pronounce and spell names varies tremendously.

English and vernacular versions of their names.

a standard method for grouping words by how similar they sound,

to help us link and match existing records.

software engineers developed for personal computers,

we knew our power system is not reliable enough

So we repurposed touch screen point-of-sale terminals

At the time, we imported internet appliances called i-Openers

that were manufactured during the dot-com era

and their power system to run from rechargeable batteries.

When we started, we didn't find a reliable network to transmit data,

we observed health care workers use the system

and iteratively build an information system

These are hospitals serving over 2,000 HIV patients, each clinic.

Now, health care workers who used to spend days

are producing the same reports within minutes,

and health care experts from all over the world

are now coming to Malawi to learn how we did it.

to follow technology trends across the globe,

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【TED】Soyapi Mumba: Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs (Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs | Soyapi Mumba)

struggle

passionate

epidemic

infrastructure