We are Honored to be the Rockefeller Foundation 2012 Innovation Challenges Winner for KMES Project!!!
KMES in the news
More news:
Telegraph (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120828/jsp/calcutta/story_15906638.jsp)
The Kolkata Medical Emergency System (KMES) project will create a centralized, real-time medical emergency system for the most densely populated metropolitan city of India, Kolkata, West Bengal, to manage availability of Emergency Healthcare Facilities & Products. By providing a critical intervention in the medical emergency management supply chain KMES will provide the people for Kolkata with the means to make life saving decisions in real-time. Through this intervention KMES will address the fundamentals of urgent care, the availability of Critical care units (CCU) beds and blood & blood products.
In partnerships with Kolkata’s primary hospitals and blood banks, KMES will gather data and broadcast data to general public, healthcare providers and emergency responders via multiple channels, such as Phone, Mobile Phone and Internet.
In India’s deeply divided two-tier Healthcare system KMES introduces social justice and cultural change by making uniform, highly relevant emergency medical data available to all citizens irrespective of their social or economic status.
What KMES Aims to Solve
During a medical emergency, the patient needs to be admitted urgently to the nearest available Critical Care Unit (CCU) or Intensive Care/Therapy Unit (ICU/ITU). Often the patient needs to be moved from one hospital to another due to unavailability of CCU beds. Further delay may be caused by the shortage of blood in the CCU. Every year, several lives are lost due to the delay in reaching the right CCU for treatment, as no central medical emergency system exists in Kolkata to help in locating the nearest CCU and/or Blood banks. Therefore, making the above data points available to the residents of Kolkata through a real-time, easy-to-access system will save numerous lives.In absence of a government operated 911 type emergency system in Kolkata to help in locating the nearest open hospital bed or Blood banks with the required blood group, vital emergency care cannot reach those who need it most.
This issue is multiplied exponentially during any small scale to large scale disasters (e.g: Fire in Public area, Train Accident, Terrorist Attack, Tropical Storm & hurricane from Bay Of Bengal ), which affect several people’s health in Kolkata. Currently, their is no central, real time system for medical emergency providing CCU and Blood availability making coordination among disaster management agencies and public health services nearly impossible.
Highlights
Here are some of the highlights of the proposed system which we believe will make KMES useful and
accurate for general public during medical emergency.
· Real-time integration with Hospitals and Blood Banks and storing it centrally
· KMES will interface with individual Hospital Bed Mgmt System which are not accessible to public
· Blood Banks will use Bar Coding to do automated, accurate update to KMES
· Automated Data curation rules will ensure accuracy in the KMES central database
· Deploying all type of ”Pull” mechanisms to make the data available to public
· KMES will integrate with TV, Radio and Newspaper for data ubiquity and awareness
· GPS Technology will be used while responding a “Pull” request via SMS.
· Finally, a secure, robust, fail-safe data-center for housing the data
Broader Impact.
In India, there are two distinct HealthCare systems that divide society: one is the minimal cost (or free) public health system, and the other is high-cost, fee-based private hospital system. The poor and lower middle class flood the public health system, as they cannot afford the high cost of private hospitals. During medical emergencies, these populations do not seek out private hospitals. The affluent population who can afford the private hospitals, never access the public hospitals, though it may be just a block away. In fact, even among the private hospitals, there are tiers based on amenities provided, rather than the actual quality of medical care. Often it is a status symbol among this population to be admitted to a specific hospital because it is perceived to be “high-end.” This cultural, social, and economical doesn’t serve anyone in an emergency. KMES disrupts this process by providing the same data to everyone that allows them to act in their best interest.
We believe that KMES can address the bias by improving the low-hanging fruit in the medical system, which is “medical emergency and critical care”. It is a specific medical condition that has the ethical backing to effectively bridge the disparity in the Healthcare system. Our project is the first step in that direction.
Specifically, we hope our project will bring the following significant changes in this unequal system:
With a centralized system where public and private hospital data is exposed to the general public without any restriction the perception of divided HealthCare system will change
Every citizen with this information will feel empowered to help a fellow citizen, whatever their respective social status
And every citizen will feel comfortable going to either a public or private hospital based on proximity and availability, the most important criteria during medical emergency
The byproducts of the KMES project will be: the FOSS (Free and OpenSource Software) platform, and the best practices for implementing an emergency medical system in densely populated urban areas. These two outcomes increase the potential impact of KMES on poor and vulnerable populations worldwide. The software platform will be published under OpenSource licensing, and as such any organization will be able to use the software free of charge and change it as they see fit. With minimal changes it is likely that the system can be implemented in other cities in India as well as across South-East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. KMES can help other civic bodies and governments to implement this system in their respective cities based on the best practices learned during the pilot implementation. Along with a comprehensive FOSS Medical Emergency System, the developed software code will be contributed back to the base OpenSource frameworks (OpenMRS and DHIS2), thus strengthening the symbiotic relationship among the OpenSource communities. This is the key differentiating factor between “OpenSource & OpenData” movement compared to “Proprietary & Closed data”.
With the high cell phone penetration across all strata of society and public media’s popularity among the poor in all developing countries, we hope that an emergency management system that depends on mobile phone and public media will be able to reach over 90% of the population directly or indirectly. As such, KMES contributes to the broader change of a growing movement that leverages technology to increase awareness, reduce disparity in public health, and above all empowers the poor and vulnerable populations, resulting in social justice and equality.
Roadmap.
Further down the road, our organization aims to provide technology infrastructure, supply chain management support, and citizen engagement to create a highly functional architecture & system for medical emergency and critical care, specifically in the “Sense” and “Reach” phase of emergency care.