Digital Platform For Saving Life in Emergency - DIPSALE

Our solution is a wireless mobile web text message platform that supports, guides first responders/ local health workers to collect data, coordinate, deliver products, monitor emergencies/outbreaks response networks and strengthens health system by removing barriers in responding to health emergency and supplementing gaps in the systems through digital platform. 

The project lead is Dr. Christopher Vunni, Founder  and Executive Director of BHECO, Public health Specialist with extensive experience in global health, health care delivery, access and health innovation pathway.

Globally, 1Bn rural population lack access to health care and emergency services and will be spending at least 10% household budget on health care with 50% pushed to extreme poverty, largely because they lived in areas with no health services. When rural population do not have access to health/ emergency care services in their community, they make expending considerable time and money to make lengthy and difficult travel to access care during outbreaks or when they have acute sickness. Lack of access to   emergency services perpetuates misinformation, poor health, poverty and deaths. Limited options for these communities leave them with choice of going without or with disastrous expenditures that wreck their livelihoods. Available evidence indicates that rural population still faced persistent challenges in accessing health/emergency services during COVID-19 Pandemics. Current options to deal with access or emergency services aren’t sustainable, scalable and costly for the new emerging health/emergency challenges. Even rich countries like US face similar challenge to respond to epidemics and low income countries aren’t easily excluded primarily owing to under-developed infrastructure and a lack of public financing. Clearly, we need a new way to address challenges of health access and emergency services quickly, at low cost and sustainably. 

Our solution targets the growing need for low cost wireless mobile text message for access and epidemics-emergency response services, targeting end user living in under-resourced, rural, remote communities -specifically vulnerable rural communities, IDPs and refugee’s population. Our solution is offline, complete, easily deployable for emergency services anywhere without needing any physical infrastructure set up, easy to launch and drastically reduces cost of running emergency services. Our solution serves and benefits actors along the health Access-Emergency ecosystem such as first responders, CHWs, health workers, local governments, and NGOs. For end user-(Victims), our solutions, makes emergency services immediately available. For health system, our solution readily reduces deployment cost while also increasing their ability to reach quickly to vast geographical areas. For Government: and NGOs, our solution solves the challenges of setting up expensive traditional emergency response network systems.  We supported the training of first responders on incidents-data, alerting, coordinating and monitoring emergency response networks, awareness creation on outbreaks/ health needs. Already we have engaged the communities through training, meetings, health education and including their views. Late this year, on availability of fund, we will be deploying our solution in low resource South Sudan- Uganda hosting significant numbers of IDPs and refugee’s population. 

Our digital solution has already been piloted in limited setting is already proven to be a Public good by giving access to health  and emergency responses platform in rural setting of South Sudan. We have implemented various innovation under open source policy and our digital platform solution emergency will follow the same principle. During our  pilot in limited setting in South Sudan, we engaged with Ministry of Health, NGOs private sectors and insurance company and have approved our approach to addressing emergency responses. Allowing access to our solution eases the choice of consumers in selecting appropriate digital software for addressing health challenges globally. During our implementation, we will document all our intervention, conduct community survey and case studies. As part of our Public good, we will provide and share knowledge, lesson learnt, success stories challenges generated from the solution with the public using various means. We shall openly share our success in meetings conferences. We will publish our result in open source international peer reviewed journal and available data are deposited in common repositories under Common Creative Law, and in nondiscriminatory terms to provide insight on our solution and its impact at global level.

Our solution provides platform for Emergency Response network and delivers quantifiable and qualitative impact for the local communities, first responders during epidemics. Our solution system provides emergency dispatching platform by relaying text messages from the scene of an emergency to trained responders throughout the community that enables the nearest available emergency care providers to quickly locate, treat, and transport emergency victims to local hospitals eliminating harmful impact, thus preventing death that would otherwise result without emergency interventions. The solution significantly, empowers, capacitates and increase capability to provide actionable data collected over time and reproducing it in several reports that assists public health agencies and first responders to detect and manage public health risks, promoting diseases prevention. Our solutions, makes services immediately available for victims, readily reduces deployment cost while also increasing their ability to reach quickly to vast geographical areas. Our solution solves the challenges of setting up expensive traditional emergency response-network.1) Activities: Select, train, create hub of first responders, monitor, coordinates, deliver services 2) Outputs: The local responders and community use the platform to respond to emergency care services.3) Outcome: Improved emergency services by 70% and reduce morality 4) Impact: Save lives of local population through effective emergency responses.

Our team have expertise in bringing the solution to scale. we look at bringing in and forming partnership with government, NGOs partners, financial institutions and donors. We have so far piloted our solution in limited setting  and planning to have national scale in South Sudan. We are using our experience from the limited pilot testing to reach more communities with problem of access using our emergency digital platform to make the work of other organization more effective as well. We have use similar model to reach community members with information during COVID epidemics. Built on web based CAD and in collaborations with Saviva technologies, we will be deploying our solution extensively in multiple countries which includes South Sudan, Uganda and DRC. Our solution can be rapidly adapted for future epidemics such as malaria, Ebola, Zika and cholera using the digital platform of alert, coordinates, monitor responses, treatments and awareness campaigns as well used in the current epidemics in the multiple countries specifically COVID-19. Bringing our solution to scale involves working with the first responders who will be hired and upskill and provided with apps to deliver support, alert, coordinates, monitor responses, treatments and awareness campaigns. 

Our solution will obviously achieve its intended impact by improving emergency responses and recovery process during epidemic. We shall regularly monitor the platform activities for its performance, suitability and effectiveness in addressing the emergency response network. We will monitor the number of local responders, alerts, transportation of victims to the hospital. We will also monitor emergency resources through focusing on emergency alerts, incidents, coordination, responders and vehicle across larger geographical area. We shall to use the detailed recorded and stored data from every emergency incident dispatched analyzing the reports for detecting and managing public health risk and potential for epidemic outbreaks. Our measure will focus on key performance indicators of our solution covering process, outcome, output and impact. We will specifically monitor the use of system for emergency incident dispatch on 24/7 basis to the local community, first responders who have responded to dispatch communication on emergency incidents, emergency victims that has been successfully transported to hospital for management, trained, formal and informal first local responders and life saved from emergency incidents and epidemics. In long run, we will be able to determine the impact of our solution on the victims (deaths, life saved) during emergency using the data collected.

1) Raising sufficient funding to scale our operations and ready ourselves for market launch especially given that we are taking a risk to develop novel technology platform for low-income conflicted markets. We address this by Fundraising: We have started to look at some innovative partnership to help generate earlier revenues sponsored deployments, strategic investments, integration digital health consulting services. Also, as we begin to generate data from our field test and demonstrate the potential of our innovation, we should be able to have more advanced discussions with investors

4)Lack of capacity and Standards: Not well developed systems and services. This could potentially delay project milestones and slow programming of piloting and scaling of the solution on ground. We address this by bringing together Ministry of Health and ICT to create relevant policies, including standards and build capacity.

2)Culture of traditional health system: Local rural communities are used to accessing traditional health systems based on person-to-person interaction and some might remain skeptical using our solution and might prefer travelling directly to hospital for consultation and treatment. We mitigate this through working with the local health system and trusted community leaders to engage communities to trust our solution.

Better Health Care Organization (BHECO), Partners in Community Social Action(PICSA) Uganda, Family Partnership to End Hunger(FPEH) Uganda and Alliance Forum for Development –AFOD Uganda.  

The Trinity Challenge is exactly aligned with our goal for the solution to respond to health emergency. We are excited about being part of a peer network with organizations who are doing similar work to exchange learnings, advice and support. The award would greatly help us advance our work by allowing us the complete our field pilot, to launch by late 2021 so we can achieve a market ready version of our solution. Through the Trinity Challenge global network, we want to meet and share our ideas with potential digital health technology partners globally. We are also interested in growing our network and health technology partners within our region and Internationally. Our network currently remained limited, only within the local context with no growth partner or network outside South Sudan and Uganda limiting our prospect of learning new ideas and knowledge. Our goal is to grow and be world premier providers of offline health solution, and this is possible through sourcing and scaling that is possible through a platform currently best provided by Trinity Challenge and Solve community. Therefore, Trinity challenge community will be invaluable for us in ensuring broader support in terms of technical advice, resource mobilization and strategic interventions.

We received initial funding from Child Health Foundation. We partnered with Saviva Technology. For our field pilot, we are deploying our solution to the Eastern- Central Equatoria State of South Sudan, trailing at vulnerable community. Our Local ground partner Saviva Technologies is key in deploying the solution, troubleshooting, training, capacity building of the first responders and health workers including managing the day to day monitoring of implementation. We planned to partner with organization that provides peer–peer networking, technology mentorship, impact measurement, media Visibility and Exposure to Grant Funding. This year, we need to raise significant funding to pilot our solution. We hope to leverage the Trinity ecosystem to find funders and investors aligned with our impact goals. We also need connections to governments-donors who procure and deploy digital systems at large scale. We hope to gain visibility globally. We would also like to work with NGOs that facilitate health/emergency enhancement programs. Lastly, we would like to help and benefit from any partnerships from organizations that procure health technology for disaster-humanitarian relief as part of government or UN bids. We also hope to partner with other Trinity ecosystem-teams to establish synergies/collaborations to amplify all our efforts to deliver better services.