About IRD
Karachi's newborns are not properly identified or tracked through the current health care system. Mothers take their children to be seen by different practitioners or clinics throughout their lives but there is no centralized electronic documentation for their medical records. One consequential problem is that the newborns' health records (vaccinations, illnesses, development stage, etc.) cannot be retrieved promptly during an appointment. The IRD/PATH project seeks to perform a surveillance study to follow 0-24-month-old infants. They intend to screen and further evaluate those infants who are thought to have pneumonia. Infants diagnosed with pneumonia will be further examined by a physician affiliated with IRD/PATH that will travel to the infant's location at one of the 20 to 50 distributed and unaffiliated clinics or 7 hospitals. As there is no centralized record or identification system, we plan to design and build a patient presence alert system which will identify infants participating in the IRD/PATH study (approx. 7500 patients). When a participating infant is identified, the General Practitioner presiding over the clinic will be queried as to the infant's pneumonia condition, and the IRD/PATH team will be dispatched to handle positive identifications of pneumonia in participants to gather more information. Our potential goal is to provide a low-cost RFID and/or barcode cell-phone based patient tracking system. This technology will alert GPs to study participant's presence in their office, and the IRD/PATH team to the GP's diagnosis.
