The Pen is Mightier Than the Dipstick

Simple diagnostic tests, such as those conducted with a urine dipstick, can be extremely effective it paving the way for life-saving treatments. However, dipstick tests can fall short in developing countries because the cost of mass distribution is too high in many casese. A dipstick for antenatal screening can cost 20 cents per test, which may not seem expensive, but is in many portions of the developing world.

Much of the need for diagnostic testing is associated with maternal health. In reponsose, The Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins Univerisity and its affiliate jhpiego, developed a more affordable alternative. It turns out the chemicals used testing are inexpensive, but the disptick delivery method adds to the cost. Developers found the solution in a felt-tip pen. The pen contains the chemicals needed to test for condtions such as amemia, newborn jaundice and pre-eclampsia. An individual test costs less than one cent.

The students won accolades from the Lemelson Foundation, the Duke Global Health Institute and ABC News for their work.

To view a video about the innovation, visit this link.

Odoreader looks to stop global killer diarrhea

Diarrhea kills 7000 people worldwide, with most deaths occuring in the poorer nations of Asia and Africa. Eighty percent of the victims are under age 5. At the University of the West of England, Dr. Norman Ratcliffe and his colleagues have developed an innovation called Odoreader, a stand-alone, battery-powered, low-cost device that detects diagnostic profiles of volatile gasses emitted from diarrheal stool and links the diagnosis made to treatment options on its display screen. Dr. Ratcliffe discussed Odoreader and its potential to reduce deaths caused by diarrhea during his visit to the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C. Watch a video interview here.

Cardiocity – Providing an ECG with no “strings” attached

At the 2011 WHCC Health Innovations Exhibit in Washington, D.C., one of the innovations on display looked more like a place mat than a heart monitor, but the Rhythm Pad isn’t designed for the kitchen table.

Developed by Cardiocity in the UK, Rhythm Pad allows a short term rhythm strip to be obtained by a patient simply placing their hands on the pad. The rhythm strip is then analysed and classified, before the summary is exported to the patient electronic medical record. In such a manner the patients rhythm can be monitored every time they visit the surgery., and performance trending can be obtained over many years. The Rhythm Pad provides a simple step forward for monitor patients with potential rhythm problems over a period of time, without the need for wires, electrodes, gels, and complex analysis. The test takes about 90 seconds.

The innovation holds potential promise for the developing world, where ECGs could be condcuted with the Rhythm Pad. Click here to watch an interview with Chris Crockford for Cardiovity on this interesting device.

Study highlights future of mobile phone use for medical care

The University of Cambridge and China Mobile recently generated the comprehensive report “Mobile Communications in Medical Care,” which “examines the use of mobile networks to enhance health care as an example of how mobile communications can contribute to sustainable development.”

Mobile Health, or mHealth as it is more commonly known, has emeraged as a serious player inhealth care. With the global proliferation of the mobile phone – and its souped-up offspring, the smartphone, mHealth is viewed my many as a means to better health data collection, communication and even health care delivery.

The report details mHealth applications in developed and developing countires, as well as the health care business models the mobile phone has produced.

It’s a good and interesting read.

For more on mHealth and other health care innovations, visit the WHCC Health Innovations Global Initiative site at www.whcchealthinnovations.org

Maternova: Creating an online portal for life-saving maternal tecnhologies

The statistics on global maternal death are staggering. Each year between 350,000-536,000 women die a maternal death and 1 million children are left motherless due to maternal death. The vast majority of these deaths occur in the developing world where access to basic maternal and birth care are limited or non-existent.

However, there are numerous simple and effective technologies that can prevent materal death. The problem is they suffer from poor distribution channels and can easily go unnoticed and underutilized in broad markets.

Founded in 2009, Maternova aggregates on one Web site www.maternova.net numerous effective safe-saving materal health technologies and products. It also assembles an obstetrics kit that contains several tools that can be administered to birthing mothers.

Maternova founder Meg Wirth presented a poster at the 2011 WHCC Affordable Health Innovation Exhibit in Washington, D.C. and spoke with the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Global Initiative about global maternal health and how Maternova is helping to fill a signicant gap in care.

Many people may be surprised to know childbirth is the leading cause of death among women of childbearing age in the developing world. What are some of the main reasons for this?

The main overarching reason for this is that women do not have access to life-saving obstetric services-they live too far away, they don’t have money to pay, they don’t recognize the complication’s danger until it is too late, the trained staff simply are not present. Emergencies are hard to predict yet they do occur in a fraction of all women giving birth. For example, if you need a cesarean section and you live in the U.S. your chances of death are slim. If you live in a rural setting 8 hours from the nearest obstetrician and anesthesiologist,, there is a very high likelihood you will lose your life trying to give birth.

How can Maternova help?

We are essentially an aggregator looking at what technologies already exist but just aren’t well-distributed, and what low-cost innovations are coming down the pike. We research innovations and get them all online in one searchable index. The Index includes things like solar powered headlamps, bamboo ambulances, portable ultrasounds, $20 birth simulators and 100 others.

We have gotten feedback supporting our hypothesis that this is quite useful to the field because it avoids duplication– a bright biomedicine team looking for a project can focus on the areas where there are gaps and avoid reinventing the wheel. It is also helpful because clinicians learn about promising tools as they are being developed, offering to test them, find field sites and then actually access them the moment that they are available for sale.

What are some of the challenges innovators face in getting their products to the market?

One of the challenges we see a lot is that brilliant scientific and clinical minds come up with life-saving technologies, but these same individuals for the most part simply to not have the time to shepherd the product to market. They have clinical and research responsibilities and as a society, we probably want to support their focus on what they do best– innovating. We are exploring models for bundling new technologies together and testing and distributing them together to maximize efficiency, while still ensuring that the innovator receives compensation for his or her ideas.

Tell us about Maternova’s mapping tool

Our mapping tool is essentially a visual database allowing a health services director or project to create an online map connected to a database. Say you have 40 clinics and tracking those clinics and their quality of care indicators in a spreadsheet is just not sufficient. The Maternova mapping tools is a software as service model that allows you to quickly create a little online map sitting on your website with pushpins for clinics that click through to more complex information on quality of care. It’s updatable, readily loads and provides a visual way to manage data. We piloted it in Chiapas Mexico with ARHP and funding from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

What are your long term goals for Matermova?

We want to continue to add depth and breadth to the innovations we cover. We want to partner broadly and help to do our part to spark innovation in areas that are understudied yet play a huge role in maternal death.

For more information, vistit www.maternova.net.

WHCC Middle East Health Innovations Awards – Posters and nominations accepted

The 2nd Annual World Health Care Congress Middle East, the premier global event for health care innovations, is pleased to announce it will host the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Poster Exhibit and Awards Program December 11-13 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The exhibit offers health care innovators, including those working to provide affordable health care solutions to residents of developing countries, a unique opportunity to share their work with a world class audience. The WHCC Middle East organized in collaboration with sovereign partners the Health Authority-Abu Dhabi and the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority.

To submit an abstract to have a poster considered to inclusion in the exhibit visit
www.worldcongress.com/me/posters. There is no cost to submit an abstract or nominate a program or project for award considerations. Organizations are permitted to nominate themselves for an award.

The WHCC Middle East Poster Exhibit welcomes submissions from health care innovators who wish to attend the conference to present their poster. As part of the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Global Initiative www.whcchealthinnovations.org, the poster program will include an awards ceremony to recognize top submissions. The poster display is integrated with the general conference exhibit area, and presenters are invited to attend all conference programming and general functions. Poster presenters are encouraged to bring actual devices and examples of their innovations for display along with the posters. All posters are also posted on and promoted through the www.whcchealthinnovations.org Web site.

Poster categories include, but are not limited to.
Mobile health, telemedicine and call centers
Hospital and health system innovations
Point and care diagnostics and low-cost diagnostic devices
Maternal health
Rural clinics, right-staffing and training
Health care research (i.e. research labs, college and university projects)

About the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Global Initiative
The WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Program allows global organizations an opportunity to showcase initiatives that provide affordable, sustainable and scalable solutions to improving health care. This site, developed in collaboration with the World Health Care Congress, is designed as a year-round community where organizations can present their programs and research.

About the World Health Care Congress Middle East
The 2nd Annual World Health Care Congress Middle East (WHCC ME), co-sponsored by the Health Authority Abu Dhabi and the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, is a global event in which over 600 health care, government and corporate leaders from over 25 countries come together to define objectives and frame solutions to the challenges of health care reform, cost, quality and delivery. The 2011 WHCC ME Congress will feature the top thought leaders and industry influencers including health ministers, leading government officials, hospital directors, health system and hospital providers, chief financial leaders, IT innovators, decision makers from public and private insurance funds, investment and venture capital principals, pharmaceutical and biotech executives, and health care industry suppliers.

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Lessons from the battlefield– are QuikClot® and FloSeal promising for women in low-resource settings?

This post originally appeared at the Maternova blog.

The leading preventable cause of death on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan is hemorrhage. And the leading cause of death on the frontlines of the effort to save mothers in childbirth is also hemorrhage. We follow all angles from transport to the LifeWrap to new drugs and devices that might save women’s lives. But in the next series of blogs we will look at the military for inspiration. It makes perfect sense; They are spending millions to save men and women from dying of blood loss and where possible those lessons should transfer to women in childbirth.

While prior posts have covered garments that wrap around a woman to reverse shock, and drugs (and antifibrinolytic called TXA) that might save her life, we have yet to look in depth at devices and innovations that directly address the cause of the hemorrhage. The balloon catheter is one such device which we will look at later. Another innovation is a hemostatic agent like QuikClot® which acts to clot the blood at the source of a tear or injury as much as ten times as quickly as the natural rate. The active ingredient at play is kaolin which is a mineral made of aluminum silicate clay powder called kaolin. The kaolin is embedded in a gauze-like material which is applied at the site of the laceration or wound.

Made by Z-Medica, QuikClot® is now standard issue for military personnel and it is now widely available in direct-to-consumer medical kits to stop bleeding. The product is now being examined for use in low-income and humanitarian settings, but NO one has yet addressed its use in an obstetric setting that we are aware of. The site Modern Medicine neatly describes QuikClot as little molecular sponges sifting out and absorbing the smaller water molecules from the blood and leaving behind a concentration of natural clotting factors.

At a recent event on new ideas for postpartum hemorrhage, a PATH presenter noted that haemostatic agents were useful for hard to reach areas of the body.FloSeal™ is a gel rather than a gauze and it conforms to hard to reach spaces and surfaces. The gel can be squirted into an area that is uncontrollably oozing blood, and it acts in two minutes to help coagulation. There is one case report of this product being used in an obstetric hemorrhage when all else failed. In this article in the esteemed British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, FloSeal™ is used in an extreme case of postpartum hemorrhage post-hysterectomy. This case was the first time that the product was reported in use during an obstetric emergency.

Many questions remain, but the central innovation of haemostatic agents that may stop massive postpartum hemorrhage is an important new tool in the toolbox for saving maternal lives. And most importantly, how can we speed up the process from the time these questions are first asked to the time we get the products distributed?

Telemedicine India, Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing, AYZH, honored at WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Exhibit, April 2011, Washington, D.C.

A special program that is training women in rural Bangladesh to become nurses, a project that allows doctors in India to make “house calls” with residents who cannot easily visit a care center, and a global effort to fulfill the needs of impoverished women by bringing them affordable appropriate technologies that increase income and improve health, were honored this month as part of the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Exhibit in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit, which featured 75 innovations from around the world, was held in conjunction with the 8th Annual World Health Care Congress and WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Global Initiative. This marks the third consecutive year WHCC has granted awards to poster presenters.

Telemedince India of the Apollo Hospital Groups earned the top award for its initiative that uses a webcam enabled laptop and wireless modem so doctors can make virtual house visits. Visits to hospitals are time consuming, expensive and physically challenging particularly if the patient is elderly and/ or physically or mentally challenged. There is considerable stress on the near and dear to work out all the logistics. In the 21st century, house visits particularly by specialists are almost unknown.

Sangita Reddy, CEO, of Apollo Hospital Groups accepted the award at WHCC on behalf of the Telemedicine Department.

AYZH (pronounced ‘eyes’) received an award for its efforts to prevent maternal and newborn death, a significant problem in the developing world. Roughly 1,600 women per day die from complications associated with pregnancy or childbirth, due to infection as the leading cause. AYZH distributes JANMA – clean birth kits – that costs $2 and can dramatically reduce lethal childbirth infection. It is sourced and assembled in India by rural women, creating economic opportunity in the communities they serve. They distribute JANMA through an established network of local pharmacies, clinics, and women-focused nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations.

Zubaida Bai, CEO and founder of AYZH accepted the award.

The Grameen Caledonian College (GCU) of Nursing in Scotland received an award for its program that trains rural women in Bangladesh to become nurses. The need for qualified nurses in Bangladesh is significant. Compared to the United Kingdom, where 680,000 registered nurses serve a population of 60 million, Bangladesh struggles with only 23,000 nurses for their population of 145 million. Through its work with The Grameen Trust, GCU is establishing a high-quality college for the education of nurses and midwives in Dhaka. The college is developing nursing and midwifery standards in Bangladesh to an international level through the provision of the highest quality education and research.

Barbra Parfitt, Director of the Caledonian Centre for Global Health, accepted the award.

WHCC Affordable Health Innovations

WHCC Affordable Health Innovations

8th Annual World Health Care Congress welcomes International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery

The 8th Annual World Health Care Congress, to be held April 4-6 in Washington, D.C., is pleased to welcome the a strategic partership with the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD).

The IDIHP is closely alligned with WHCC’s 2nd Annual World Health Innovation Summit, which will gather representatives from more than 50 countries to discuss health innovations from the developing world that can be applied to developed countries.

McKinsey & Company, one of the IPIHD supporters, has identified more than 30 successful private sector examples of private health care organizations that are using innovation to provide quality, effective care at low cost. For example, Medicall Home in Mexico provides telephone based advice and triage to more than 5 million people. For a fixed fee of $5 a month, billed through their phone bill, two-thirds of callers have their healthcare issue resolved over the phone. In India, LifeSpring maternity hospitals offer high quality, no-frills, maternity care at one-fifth of the cost of comparable private-sector competitors (an accessibly priced $40 rather than the typical $200). IPIHD recognizes many of the most forward-thinking innovations emerge in developing countries because of the significant demand for innovation.

Innovations McKinsey has identifed will be on display at part of the WHCC Affordable Health Innovations Poster Exhibit.

In addition to McKinsey & Company, the IPIHD is organized through the support of Duke Medicine, World Economic Forum, Aetna, Astra Zeneca, Medtronic, Merck, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and Zuellig Group. The World Health Innovations Summit will feature participation from the following IPIHD representatives:

-Dr. Viktor Hediger, Partner, McKinsey & Co. Inc. as Summit Chairman on April 4th
-Olivier Raynaud, MD, Senior Director, Global Health and Healthcare Sector, World Economic Forum – Geneva
-Victor Dzau, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer, Duke University Medical Center and Health System