From CommCare's support of community health workers to RapidSMS's ability to monitor childhood illnesses, a number of OMC technologies are being used to improve healthcare delivery in developing regions. As part of this effort, the OMC is also connecting these technologies to larger and more domain-specific systems like OpenMRS -- an open source medical record system used in over 20 developing countries.

Reasons to Bring Mobile to OpenMRS

In most deployments of OpenMRS, clinicians fill out a paper form with patient data. They place that form into the patient's folder and every few days, data clerks enter that information into the OpenMRS server. Once in the server, the data is available for clinical studies, administrative reports and sometimes printed patient summaries. While this is an improvement over a purely paper-based system, it also has a major flaw -- useful patient data (clinical alerts, lab tests, drug interactions) are not readily available to clinicians for decision making.

To address this issue, the Open Data Kit (ODK) team has been working with the OpenMRS and OpenXData communities to bring mobile phone connectivity using ODK to OpenMRS. Specifically, ODK now has OpenMRS form filling and patient record syncing -- two features that push patient data collection and observation to the mobile phone.

One of OMC's primary goals is to maximize interoperability and data-sharing capabilities among our technologies so that the whole of our collective effort is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Think of the OMC technologies as a set of Lego-like building blocks that can be snapped together in different ways. It's a great goal in theory, for sure -- but in practice it is more difficult to achieve. There is redundancy, and systems that could and should share data may not.  Being open source or championing open standards is necessary -- and we certainly do – but it's not sufficient.

Building the Open Source Mobile "Lego" Pieces for Social Impact

This is a story about progress towards integrating several OMC technologies in Tanzania and some of the lessons we are learning along the way. It illustrates the potential of the OMC ‘Lego’ pieces for mobile for social impact and where we still need to do more work.

One of the biggest challenges facing field operations in the developing world is access to accurate, reliable and timely information. Innovative uses for new technologies are increasingly being applied to classic humanitarian and development challenges.

With the recent proliferation of technology throughout the developing world, the ability to improve this access has become cheaper and the tools to do so more ubiquitous. It is clear that a fundamental reassessment of the way we interact with emerging technologies is already occurring across the developing world and that simple devices, like the mobile phone, are revolutionizing the way people in developing countries interact within their communities and with the larger world.

This past month the RapidSMS community, hosted by UNICEF, led a mini-summit bringing together key programmers and project managers who have contributed to various iterations of a new data collection platform.

RapidSMS is a SMS-text message based framework that incorporates a host of diverse mobile applications on the same underlying piece of computer code to enable mass-scale mobile data collection, remote health diagnoses, logistics coordination and communication. Whether tracking delivery of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) in areas suffering from famine or assisting rural health care workers provide better quality care, the ability to quickly collect, analyze and disseminate real time data is proving invaluable to everyone from operational managers to policy makers.

The current RapidSMS framework is a direct product of actual use cases from the field, crafted to solve specific and real problems. With successful pilots in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Uganda, a host of UNICEF country offices and partners are requesting support for similar projects. The time had come to pool together the knowledge and experience from past implementations, consolidate gains, and coordinate a pragmatic way forward.

Technology has great potential for improving maternal and child health, reducing the number of preventable deaths, and diagnosing and treating the diseases of poverty such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

For decades, however, applying information and communication technology to address the world’s critical health problems has left much to be desired.

Proprietary legacy systems that do not communicate with other proprietary legacy systems and incompatible standards have not served global public interests.