Gaetano Borriello – Personalizing Public Health
Gaetano Borriello is the Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, as well as an adjunct faculty in the Information School and the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. Much of his research focuses on technology’s applications to public health. His current project, the Open Data Kit, works to develop a suite of open-source mobile tools for community health workers in East Africa.
Gaetano works with a team of grad students at UW to tackle health issues in South Africa. His story highlights one of those students, Brian, a young man who spent time in Southern Tanzania in the town of Mtwara. It’s a poor place, surrounded by a rural, agricultural environment. If you get sick, you are going to have issues finding the appropriate health care: there are 0.02 doctors per 1,000 people, the lowest of any country. That’s 50,000 people for every doctor. It would be like Seattle having 20 doctors– there are more than that in just one office at UW med.
More often, you look for a clinician with some medical training rather than an actual doctor. The Wold Health Organization is trying to help; they publish manuals for taking care of sick children to help manage childhood illness. It also includes advice for the mother: what to tell her to ensure maximum safety for the child?
Essentially, the clinicians are doing triage for treatable health conditions in order to maximize seriously ill children’s time with doctor. However, in reality, the child is crying, the mother is concerned, the clinician has minimal training and is armed with just a paper manual– which doesn’t inspire confidence in the mother. There’s a lot of pressure to put the manual away and wing-it, often resulting in incorrect advice. Worse yet, you may misdiagnose a seriously ill case. Plus, there are incomplete records of the visit because most likely, the symptoms are not recorded.
Imagine a different situation: we introduce technology: a cell phone-like service. The manual goes into the device, providing a compact solution. The answers pop up, and record the incident, making it helpful for future reference. The clinician is less likely to misdiagnose the patient, and the phone records serve as documentation of the visit: the data collection is done. The accuracy of the diagnoses rises from 60% to 85%, and the time spent per visit is reduced by a minute.
The clinician can review cases with each other, and learn more through collaboration, leading to an increased understanding of the situation. But how does that information transfer to the next physician the next time that child comes in for a visit?
Gaetano’s team is working on turning the mobile phone into a medical device in its own right; an iPhone app that records heart and lung activity. The camera can turn into a scope, taking pictures of the inside of ears to detect infection. It becomes an entire doctor’s bag instead of just a manual.
The idea is to magnify human resources through the introduction of technology in order to leap frog limitations.
–Helen Pitlick
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