Laying the Foundation!

Finally, Friday is here. At 8:10 am, we were all set to take off in septa and land at Benjamin’s Desk conference room to discuss the next stage of our project. Our official meeting location for this project is Dhairya’s office, Office of Y-center. This is the place where everything started when we participated in the competition “Impactathon” which made a runway and led us to this day. This is where we get the encouragement to make this project a success. Great office place! Good choice Dhairya!

“You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure.”

                                    -Gordon B. Hinckley

Everyone is definitely familiar with this. In fact, we remember our parents teaching this. Thanks to our parents. Our parents will be happy to know that we are finally following this.

48 hours of the competition went really fast, from what we remember we did almost everything we could for the project that was required for the competition. But, everything in 48 hours, then may be not precisely “everything”. So we decided to start over from the basics, the way it would have been for any real project and not just for a competition. Hence.. to start by laying the foundation.

We did some research about SMS based systems that already existed in Africa. A project named SMS for Life caught our attention. SMS for life allows health workers to report stock levels via a weekly SMS text message on a simple phone.

SMS for Life can dramatically improve and even eliminate medicine stock outs at the remote health facility level. SMS for life has scaled to several African countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of the Congo. By using this simple SMS based inventory management system, the medicine stock-outs were reduced dramatically.

We wonder that this amazing SMS for Life project was around from almost three years now, but why no one ever tried to do something else other than the inventory management system. Also, what exactly did they use, a commercial API, or something through the collaboration with the Telecom Services. Vodafone is one of the major sponsors of this project. What did Vodafone do in this project? What can we learn from the SMS for Life? We will conduct a detailed research on SMS for life next week. We hope we will find the answers to our questions soon and we will let you all know.

Another huge thing that we discussed today, that grabs everyone’s attention in the U.S for sure, “Confidentiality and Anonymity of the data”. We were in the elevator when we were discussing this. But this concern was soon resolved and all thanks to Dhairya, CEO of Y-Center. He mentioned that we should use a unique ID for the patients to register so that the information is anonymous and we had a sigh of relief about another big concern we had regarding our data going to the cloud service. Also, this idea we thought could take us to contribute to something huge, like, EMR (Electronic Medical Records), EHR (Electronic Health Records), and all that fancy stuff.

And oops!!...we forgot to do the research on Malaria Kits this week. We promised Dhairya that we will get that done before our next meeting.