Tag: healthcare cloud

Mobile health (mHealth) takes off in Kenya

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Distributed computing, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, Systems, Visionary leadershp
iHanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)
Hanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today about startups and others in Kenya  providing electronic medical care via mHealth and improving the country’s health care system (see Kenya’s Startup Boom).

It seems that four interns were able to create a smartphone and web App in a little over 6 months, to help track Kenya’s infectious disease activity.   They didn’t call it healthcare-as-a-service nor was there any mention of the cloud in the story, but they were doing it all, just the same.

Old story, new ending

The Kenyan government was in the process of contracting out the design and deployment of a new service that would track the cases of infectious disease throughout the country to enable better strategies to counteract them.  They were just about ready to sign a $1.9M contract with one mobile phone company when they decided it was inappropriate for them to lock-in a single service provider.

So they decided to try a different approach, they contacted the head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) who contacted an instructor at Strathmore University who identified four recent graduates and set them to work as interns for $150/month. They spent the spring and summer gathering requirements and pounding out the App(s).  At the end of the summer it was up and running on smart phones and the web throughout their country.

They are now working on an SMS version of the system to allow others who do not own smart phones to be able to use the system to record infectious disease activity. They are also taking on a completely new task to try and track government drug shipments to hospitals and clinics to eliminate shortages and waste.

mHealth, the future of healthcare

The story cited above says that there are at least 45 mHealth programs actively being developed or already completed in Kenya. Many of them created by a startup incubator called iHub.  We have written about Kenya’s use of mobile phones to support novel services before (see Is cloud a leapfrog technology).

Some of these mHealth projects include:

  • AMPATH which uses OpenMRS (open sourced medical records platform) and SMS messaging to remind HIV patients to take their medicines and provides call-in for questions about the medication or treatments,
  • Daktari, a mobile service provider’s call-a-doc service that provides a phone-in hot-line for medical questions, in a country with only one doctor per every 6000 citizens, such phone-in health care can more effectively leverage the meagre healthcare resources available,
  • MedAfrica App which provides doctors or dentists phone numbers and menus to find basic healthcare and diagnostic information in Kenya.

There are many others mHealth projects on the drawing board including a national electronic medical records (EMR) service, medical health payment cards loaded up using mobile payments, and others.

Electronic medical care through mHealth

It seems that Kenya is becoming a leading edge provider of mHealth solutions based in the cloud mainly because it’s inexpensive, fits well with technology that pervades the country, and can be scaled up rapidly to cover its citizens.

If Kenya can move to deploy healthcare-as-a-service using mobile phones, so can the rest of the third world.

Speaking of mHealth, I got a new free app on my iPhone the other day called iTriage, check it out.

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EMCWorld day 3 …

Posted on by Ray in Data, Data grid, Data retention, Distributed computing, File Storage, Storage architecture, Storage Backup, Systems

Sometime this week EMC announced a new generation of Isilon NearLine storage which now includes HGST 3TB SATA disk drives.  With the new capacity the multi-node (144) Isilon cluster using the 108NL nodes can support 15PB of file data in a single file system.

Some of the booths along the walk to the solutions pavilion highlight EMC innovation winners. Two that caught my interest included:

  • Constellation computing – not quite sure how to define this but it’s distributed computing along with distributed data creation.  The intent is to move the data processing to the source of the data creation and keep the data there.  This might be very useful for applications that have many data sources and where data processing capabilities can be moved out to the nodes where the data was created. Seems highly scaleable but may depend on the ability to carve up the processing to work on the local data. I can see where compression, encryption, indexing and some statistical summarization can be done at the data creation site before it’s sent elsewhere. Sort of like both a sensor mesh with a processing nodes attached to the sensors configured as a sensor-proccessing grid.  Only one thing concerned me, there didn’t seem to be any central repository or control to this computing environment.  Probably what they intended, as the distributed solution is more adaptable and more scaleable than a centrally controlled environment.
  • Developing world healthcare cloud – seemed to be all about delivering healthcare to the bottom of the pyramid.  They won EMC’s social innovation award and are working with a group in Rwanda to try to provide better healthcare to remote villages.  It’s built around OpenMRS as a backend medical record archive hosted on EMC DC powered Iomega NAS storage and uses Google’s OpenDataKit to work with the data on mobile and laptop devices.  They showed a mobile phone which could be used to create, record and retrieve healthcare information (OpenMRS records) remotely and upload it sometime later when in range of a cell tower.  The solution also supports the download of a portion of the medical center’s health record database (e.g., a “cohort” slice, think a village’s healthcare records) onto a laptop, usable offline by a healthcare provider to update and record  patient health changes onsite and remotely.  Pulling all the technology together and delivering this as an application stack usable on mobile and laptop devices with minimal IT sophistication, storage and remote/mobile access are where the challenges lie.

Went to Sanjay’s (EMC’s CIO) keynote on EMC IT’s journey to IT-as-a-Service. As you can imagine it makes extensive use of VMware’s vSphere, vCloud, and vShield capabilities primarily in a private cloud infrastructure but they seem agnostic to a build-it or buy-it approach. EMC is about 75% virtualized today, and are starting to see significant and tangible OpEx and energy savings. They designed their North Carolina data center around the vCloud architecture and now are offering business users self service portals to provision VMs and business services…

Only caught the first section of BJ’s (President of BRS) keynote but he said recent analyst data (think IDC?) said that EMC was the overall leader (>64% market share) in purpose built backup appliances (Data Domain, Disk Library, Avamar data stores, etc.).  Too bad I had to step out but he looked like he was on a roll.

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