Tagged 'projects'

Another year, another grant application

CoPress, an initiative on its way to becoming a non-profit organization, has submitted another grant application. We’re building a better technical eco-system for student news organizations, which means that we’re creating the tools and means for the techie kids at student newspapers to share ideas, collaborate on code, and generally work together to develop really legit websites. To do this, though, will require a bit of effort (which we’re already been putting forth) and a bit of money (which we as students don’t have much of).

Ashoka’s Changemakers has a pretty cool competition called “The Power of Us: Re-imagine Media” that might help us out. The winner(s) will receive $50,000 towards their project. If you vote for us, which we very much hope you do, it might just be CoPress.

My winter term

In about a half hour, I’m headed on Continental Flight 308 to Houston, hopefully ending up in Lima at some point tonight. The plan as it stands now is to spend two months in Peru enjoying the summer and working on a few different projects.

The first destination is Arequipa, in southern Peru, to do research for Health Bridges International (HBI) on how the clinics serving the Alto Cayma catchment area can better coordinate efforts, share resources, and work together. The specialty I hope to bring is identifying ways in which communications technology (like a Google Group, Wordpress blog, or SMS) can enhance collaboration. Wayne and I worked on a questionnaire a while back that will be implemented at a healthcare providers conference on Monday and Tuesday. Here are some of the questions we’ll be asking:

  • What types of resources are you commonly lacking?
  • Do you have internet access?
  • Do check email regularly? How often?
  • Are you interested in collaborating with other local clinics/ organizations?
  • Would you be interested in sharing specialty consultations?
  • Would you be interested in sharing supplies or resources?

We’ll be trying to keep it short, but I’d enjoy any and all feedback on the questions we’re asking, as well as ideas on how to connect clinics with limited resources.

Along with doing research for HBI, I’ll be doing interviews to gather information for MobilizeMRS, a project with Isaac Holeman and (hopefully) Lewis & Clark Direct Action. These interviews, which will probably be video too, will try to deduce:

  • A solid use case for FrontlineSMS in the HBI clinic in Arequipa
  • What different stakeholders think the project can do
  • The organization of the community health workers network
  • # of trips made per day by community health workers + doctors, average distance of each trip, and how they travel
  • Access to electricity

Thanks to Josh Nesbit for feedback on the scope of this research.

At the end of January, I’ll be headed to Cajamarca to work on Oregon Direct Action’s water project in San Pablo, Peru.

More soon, I promise. Final boarding time now. If you’re going to down there at the same time, hit me up. I think I’d like to do a few weekend trips to get away from work. And an FYI for those of you that follow me on Twitter: I hope to tweet as I’m traveling around. Twitter no longer delivers international SMS, however, so the conversation might seem a bit one-sided at times. My apologies in advance.

Onward!

Mobilizing Mobile Records in Resource Poor Settings

The cool thing about grants is that they will often fund the neat idea you have. The not-so-cool thing is that they generally take a lot of work and luck to be accepted.

My good friend Isaac Holeman and I entered an application on Friday to NetSquared/USAID’s Development 2.0 challenge. They’re looking to give $10,000 dollars to a project using mobile technology (like SMS or phone-based applications) that “[maximize] development impact in areas such as health, banking, education, agricultural trade, or other pressing development issues.” We think we’ve got just the idea.

We’d like to put together a bridge between mobile phones, potentially FrontlineSMS, and OpenMRS, a super neat medical records system that is beginning to gain a lot of traction in Africa because of Paul Farmer’s Partners In Health. Specifically, this would allow community health workers in the field to access and interact with the medical records database. This would, for instance, allow them to instantly query the last time a tuberculosis patient had reported taking their treatment medicine. Isaac and I are also very interested in sorting together an OpenMRS module that would “watch” the data going in and out of the database. If a bit of data passed through tagged with, say, “#emergency”, it would go to whomever the on-call doctor was. This type of functionality, as far as we can tell, doesn’t already exist. We think it would be sweet if it did.

Now, most of this project is in the very preliminary stages. With your help, though, and funding from NetSquared/USAID, we can take it to the next step. Here’s the details:

  • Voting started on Monday and will run until Friday at 5:00 pm Pacific.
  • To vote on our application, you must first register.
  • Once you’ve registered, you then have one (1) ballot with up to five (5) votes. You have to vote at least three (3) times.

Our application is called “Mobilizing Medical Records In Resource Poor Settings“. We would be very much obliged if you took the time to vote for us and, if you do and leave a comment on this blog post, I’ll send you a personal thank you.

Also, if you don’t know who else to vote for, there were a few other projects which caught my eye:

Most importantly, I think these types of projects show that mobile connectivity has tremendous potential to empower positive change. We think our project can do the same for healthcare. Thanks for the support!