APC Project Sana, eHealthServices, Wireless Innovations for the Developing World

APC Project Sana
eHealthServices, Wireless Innovations for the Developing World

Faculty: Joe Gene Quesada , Manny Calimlim, Jacob Catayoc, Ray Baquirin, Stanley Brucal, Andrique Florentino, Noel Anonas (APC Center) and Sean Sanchez
Students: Carlo Cortez (ABMA), Karl Puguna (CSIT), John Albert Villanueva (CSIT), Ken Chavez (ABMA), Jeff Barron (CSIT), Joseph Remotigue (CSIT), Bruce Gochuico (CSIT), Moses Gagarin (CSIT), Kevin Pineda (ABMA), Januarius Laygo (ABMA), Emmanuel Puno (CSIT), Awad El Shariff (CSIT)

Sana, which means “health” in Italian, also means “hope:” in Tagalog (Filipino). Asia Pacific College, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), aims to offer an open source tool aimed at empowering health workers in remote areas to get advice and diagnoses from medical experts by sending text and images via the mobile phone

http://www.emc.com/leadership/features/tackling-telemedicine.htm

Sana supports remote diagnosis by medical specialists via mobile devices. and enables remote health workers in rural areas to send text and images via mobile phone for rapid diagnosis and treatment recommendations. For health workers outside of major urban areas, Sana connects them with medical professionals, supporting the delivery of quality care to the furthest reaches of wireless communications. The limited reach of specialists, especially in the developing world, can then be extended by remotely dispensing a diagnosis.

Sana aims to revolutionize healthcare delivery for rural underserved populations. To this end, Sana provides an open-source Android-based telemedicine platform for clinical research and best-practice health care delivery. Champions from Asia Pacific College have started a developer community, and serves as the technical and operational support for ongoing projects.

Mr. Jose Eugenio Quesada, an IT professor at Asia Pacific College (APC) learned about the Sana effort through Ted Chan and Katherine Kuan of MIT. APC students and graduates are using Sana in conjunction with OpenMRS, a standardized medical records data base with which Sana was built to integrate. Quesada is working with the Sana team at MIT via the Internet to install and learn the different components of the cellphone-based platform, with the goal to customize the system to allow to extend their reach to rural populations “that badly need their services.” The teams are focused on technology fundamentals of Sana and its connectivity to OpenMRS. The collaborative effort is funded by CS Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization that supports projects to help the Filipino people, as well as by APC. Quesada acknowledges major hurdles in deploying Sana in his country, he says mastering the technical challenges is its current task. Beyond that, he says, his group plans to work with doctor organizations “to deal with the issues together.”