My notes from Gaetano Borriello’s talk “Personalizing Public Health” at TEDxSeattle.
Tanzania has one doctor for every 50,000 people. That would be like Seattle having 20 doctors. It’s unlikely that parents can find doctors when their children are sick. Parents instead find less qualified clinicians. The World Health Organization publishes a manual for those clinicians to treat childhood illnesses. It tells them what symptoms to observe and ask about, as well as what advice to give the parent. The idea is to send the easily treatable children home and get the seriously ill children to the hospital accurately and quickly, so that the doctor’s time is taken up with the most serious cases.
What happened is that the parents doubt clinicians who are referring to a manual to treat their children, so the clinicians attempt to memorize the manual, and frequently do it incorrectly. It also causes them to take fewer notes and records.
When you introduce a cell-phone-like device that has the same manual in it, we can present the information in a more useful way, and it’s more socially acceptable to parents, leading to better diagnoses and better records. 25% more cases now adhere to the WHO protocol. Now that the record is in the device, clinicians can review cases collaboratively.
Future challenges:
How do we display the information we captured for the next clinician who will see the child? Can we record heart and lung sounds? Can we take pictures?
We are trying to magnify limited human resources through technology. Capture, interpret, advise.
Sarah’s commentary:
Fantastic talk! I loved it!
