CIDRZ from andresmh on Vimeo.

A needs assessment survery was developed to better define logistics required for project implementation, obtain more information about the users of the application, and identify operational, technical and programmatic project risks. The group will not be able to travel to Zambia during the semester ot conduct the survey. Instead, we have arranged for a telephone conference with the doctors and nurses in Zambia who are involved with the project. This will take place on March 17. In addition to needs assessment survey, the following will be discussed during the telephone conference: workflow re-design to facilitate scaling to a nationwide cervical cancer screening, design of the pilot implementation, the strategy for roll-out, and QA processes that need to be in place.
We have developed an action plan and a proposed time table. These have been incorporated into the project documentations. The 3 main tasks for the project are:
1. research and experimentation to create a protocol for repeatable, high quality image capture of the cervix
2. adoption of the JavaRosa project for Open Source mobile XForm development for image transmission through GPRS

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfv5t84r_348s4pjvqj

Who is the target population?
Nurses in rural (possibly some urban as well) areas of Zambia that do cervical cancer screening.
Doctors reviewing the images. Doctors in the US might be recruited to help out to improve turn-around time for decision support.
There is a possibility that health care workers will be recruited once the project is scaled nationally.
Number of doctors, nurses +/- HCW's unknown

What demographic data do we need?
Usual demographics (age, sex, work location)
For nurses, RN or LPN?
Highest educational level of HCW
Are they salaried or volunteers?
Are they part-time or full-time?

What infrastructure (physical and human) information would help you design your project/product?
What areas are we trying to cover?
Coverage of MMS and GPRS/CDMA. Which carrier to use?
Where will the server be? Hospital or CIDRZ headquarters? Do they already host server there?
Internet connectivity between carrier and server
Are there technical people to provide support to the users and to do server maintenance?
Power availability

Intent

We are developing the process that would facilitate the use of mobile device to transport images taken by nurses at health care centers (point-of-care) in rural Zambia to a server in Lusaka where doctors can access the images in order to provide expert advice on cervical lesions. We would like to explore the use of this approach to facilitate a scalable national cervical cancer screening program. Finally, we would like to design a platform that would allow transfer of the images directly to an electronic medical record database for archiving.

Background