Phones Deliver Doctor's Orders in Africa with FrontlineSMS

This article discusses the development model of FrontlineSMS:Medic, which uses one-to-one and group text messaging to deliver health care in disparate and remote parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Begun as a mobile health solutions start-up company in the "independent, grassroots, free and open-source tech movement to create change", this company launched a pilot programme in Malawi using donated mobile phones, a computer, and a modem. With this system, doctors in central hospitals in Malawi are linked with health workers in remote villages through cell phones and short message service (SMS). The project trains village health workers to use an open-source SMS platform to keep track of patients.

The group is trying to scale up health worker cell phone use in Malawi through a project called Hope Phones, where owners donate their old phones. They then take the phones, recycle them through a company called The Wireless Source, and use the proceeds to buy new new handsets from local markets (which makes it easier to standardise instructions for FrontlineSMS:Medic). Since piloting the programme in 2008, they have gone from training 85 health care workers to 1,000 and are hoping to double that by 2010. Initially, projects spread "Obama campaign-style", through bands of college students eager to code the phone software or volunteer in Africa on research grant money. They are trying to train local African university students to manage the programme as well. In addition, as stated here, they are working with other researchers, who are "hacking basic candy bar phones to deliver advanced diagnostic capabilities. A partner, Aydogan Ozcan, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), US, figured out a way to turn a cell phone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV and malaria all with an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires."

The nonprofit organisation creates and distributes free and open source tools, such as the recently released PatientView software, which lets clinics manage patient records anywhere there is a mobile signal.