Maternal Health (mHealth) System

Project Result

Maternal Health is an automated health tracking large scale for first responders and health workers who work for different NGOs. I was working as a software engineer, mainly responsible for the design and development, mobile based client solutions and web services to handle different client requests. It was a team of 8 members and my role was very crucial to develop all the web services in case of emergency and no ways of performing client requests during remote areas.

Health services are always the top most priority in first world countries and there are no places in the world where health systems are perfect. For 3rd world countries, it has become worse especially in rural areas where transportation systems are very bad and health services like hospitals and community services are not available. Moreover, in some places electricity is a major problem and so as mobile networks. People have to travel miles of distance to go to the hospitals for any serious maternal health problems.

To solve some scenarios and mitigate the risk, mHealth is the first mobile base solution deployed to different 3rd world countries. Health Worker can monitor the patient's update information using a mobile application to serve. For emergency situations, doctors from hospitals can monitor remotely and suggest proper steps so the health worker can apply. Status of every single day can be measured from current and previous weeks data to assess the possible risk so that patients can be moved to hospitals. In case of no network situation, mobile can save data in it's local memory and sync when network is come.

Business Implications

This reduces a significant amount of early child death and is appreciated by WHO.

Maternal Health a.k.a mHealth is funded by ClickDiagnostics which is a United States based company which is ultimately used by different NGOs who are working on multiple developing and under-development countries.

It was a great opportunity for Together initiatives to have an impact on millions of people by providing automated health services. As a software engineer, we have designed and developed the full solution in a fashion that it can be easily portable to any health service management. First Responder agencies, insurance companies and hospitals can use this service to track and monitor all ongoing and pre-existing condition patients to give possible medical advice so that people can avoid emergency situations and hospitalizations. The insurance companies can save a lot of money and create new business opportunities.

Difficulty of the Project

Handling millions of requests at a time with large numbers of sensitive health data securely was not an easy job. As the whole service delivery platform is based on micro-service architecture, all the web services must provide latest and synced data in response to any request. Not only that but also, if any service is down because of low network availability or internal server error, we had to implement master slave architecture to provide the continuity of service seamlessly.

Moreover, we had to implement live tracking of health workers and monitor the patient's current condition which involved locations and patients health data to service delivery platforms so that administrators can assign health workers on demand basis and doctors can verify health data and suggest necessary instructions. It involved a lot of data and different requests which we had to balance the load which was not an easy job.

There are certain corner cases where a health worker or first responder or on duty and there is no network. This was one of the difficult services that we had to ensure so that health workers can provide services from the latest data stored in local storage and update it offline so that it can sync with service delivery platforms when the network is available.

Innovative& Unique Methodology

Maternal Health (mHealth) is a large-scale automated system which can handle millions of requests from thousands of health workers in different parts of the world. When the case is health which is sensitive data, we had to handle it securely and solved a lot of corner cases.

Solving new and exceptional problems requires new or unique methodologies. Ensuring data integrity when no network is available in remote areas and availability of services at a certain level so that health workers can continue their work. We have introduced version controlling with every single state of patients data. In case of no network scenarios, that data is saved in local storage of mobile devices and can generate necessary instructions for the emergency cases. When a network is available, those data will be synced automatically with the server.

Tracking and assigning the health working remotely was one of the major challenges, because lot's data traffic will come over the network and we had to implement load balancer in between the service delivery platform and client.

Monitoring the maternal health after a certain timeframes and generating auto suggestions and alerts in case of emergency were a unique module. Service delivery platform had to get new data from health workers about new or ongoing delivery babies so that doctors from hospitals or clinics can monitor and provide necessary instructions.

Relationship to International Scope

mHealth was funded by ClickDiagnostics, an US based company who have sold the license of this product to four different NGOs who are working in South West Asia and Africa. This automated system with mobile client solutions served millions of women when they faced crisis during pregnancy and after the birth of a child.

I was working as a software engineer and have experiences of designing and developing this large scale health solutions for multiple NGOs which ultimately saved thousands of lives over time. With this solution, ClickDiagnostics creates a new ecosystem of health services for multiple countries.

Reference

http://www.i2gether.com/stories.html

https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/maternal-health/inspiration/clickdiagnostics-affordable-mhealth-platform

http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajmo/2/3/2/index.html