Last night I had the privilege of attending a Washington Health 2.0 event at The Barking Dog in Bethesda, MD. The night was full of both tech and health care folks talking about great projects they have worked on. Great food, drinks, and digital/health conversation were on the menu but my interest was sparked by two particular presentations.
Doug Naegele, CEO of Infield, gave a great presentation focused on using mobile in developing nations as an ad hoc field hospital. The long and short of it is this, in nations where hard lines and hospitals are at a minimum, innovative people can use the MMS and live video feeds from even the most basic cell phone to provide doctors in other regions with important information for diagnosing.
Doug also mentioned how creating an innovative text to phone program allowed users to request a free phone call from a friend if the text message was sponsored by a non-profit interested in providing health care information. Viewership on the host site went up 140% in a relatively short period.
I was also intrigued by a program that Glenn Pearson of Aquilent, Inc. talked about. Glenn’s program focused on creating a digital ‘missing wall’ to help reunite people during a disaster. Glenn talked about using ruggedized laptops and Bluetooth cameras to spread information during a disaster.
The thing that really sparked my interest was when Glenn began to talk about bringing the application off of laptops and onto mobiles. Opening an application like that to the public and tying it to cell phones would allow every day citizens to become part of the solution instead of waiting for the problem to be resolved by others.
The program was developed by Aquilent and can be deployed around the world at a moment’s notice. This is particularly useful in developing nations where cell networks are more relevant than land line networks.
Do you know of any other companies working in the mobile arena helping health care providers? Let me know.
Tags: events, Technology
Thanks for covering my presentation about the Lost Person Finder project, being developed at the National Library of Medicine. Besides the Haitian effort, the project’s been helping with disaster preparedness in the Bethesda area. For more about the latter (including drill pix), in the context of our use of the Sahana open-source disaster management system, see http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/dep:bethesda_2009
- Glenn
No problem Glenn. I really enjoyed the presentation and loved hearing about the work you guys are doing.
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