1. What would John Snow
use today? PDAs for public health
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, MD
The Advisory Board Company
2. Principles of
mobile medical computing
● Introductions and mobile computing terms
● Tools to share with your patrons
− EpiSurveyor: free data collection software
− Satellite Forms: rapid application design
− Voxiva: large-scale industrial strength projects
● Issues to consider in your project
4. Mobile computing terms
● Personal Digital Assistants
− Handheld computer: a computer small enough to
hold in your hand
− Smartphone: a handheld computer that can make
telephone calls
5. Advantages of smartphones
● Perhaps the best computer ever designed for
public health
− Mobility
− Connectivity
− Ubiquity
7. Early example: Satellife
● Thirty Ghanaian Red Cross volunteers, trained over a
2-day period, had no trouble with the technology,
though some of them had never before used a
computer.
− Complete over 2,400 surveys in just 3 days. Traditional
paper and pen survey method generally yielded only 200.
− Survey data were turned in at noon on the day following the
immunization campaign.
− Analysis was completed promptly after the data was hot
synched into a computer and then written up as a complete
report for the Ministry of Health by 5pm.
● The speed and ease of gathering this epidemiological
data was unprecedented. http://pda.healthnet.org/
8. EpiSurveyor: free data collection
software
● Open source survey software by Joel Selanikio,
CDC-trained MD
● Received awards from the World Bank and
others
● Deployed by public health researchers in
several countries
● www.datadyne.org
10. Satellite Forms: rapid application
design
● Palm OS and
Pocket PCs
● Anatole Menon-
Johansson
embedded HIV
medication
protocols into PDA
● anatole_uk@yahoo.co.uk
● www.vcpda.com
11. Voxiva: large-scale projects
● “Phones for Health” is building on the work of
the GSM Association Development Fund,
Voxiva, Motorola and the U.S. Government to
pilot mobile-phone based solutions for
HIV/AIDS care and treatment.
● The system also supports SMS alerting and
notification and tools for communication and
coordination with field staff.
12. Issues to consider in your project
● Optimize for the small screen
− No horizontal scrolling
● Take advantage of connectivity
− Collect data in the field, including GPS locations
− Calculate and analyze centrally
− Web pages easiest for developers but not for users
● The beauty of rapid development is frequent
testing, not rapid deployment
13. The challenge
− At the start of 2006 there were over 600 papers in PubMed™ that
dealt with handheld computers. Many lessons have accumulated in the
clinical literature but we need to understand and assimilate these
lessons. The challenge is to provide these lessons as peer-reviewed
and unbiased summaries based on scientific fact, not
marketing hype.
The Scholarships
− Five exceptional students from around the world will be selected
each year to review selected literature and make summary reports that
will be published in the Mobile Medical Computing Reviews journal.
The Scholarship winners will be mentored and trained by Dr.
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, author of four books, including “Handheld
Computers for Doctors”.
● The results
− Once complete, the reviews will be published and freely available
through the website of the new journal Mobile Medical Computing
Reviews. Each student will be able to quote their own reviews in their
list of publications.
14. Evidence-based mobility
● International Scholarship
− Applicants from the USA, Mexico, Puerto Rico, UK,
Portugal, Romania, Croatia, Egypt, Israel, India,
China, Philippines and Australia.
− http://www.handheldsfordoctors.com/scholarship/
● Peer-reviewed review journal
− http://www.handheldsfordoctors.com/research/
15. What would John Snow
use today? PDAs for public health
Slides and handout available at
www.handheldsfordoctors.com
Contact details
me@mo.md
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, MD
The Advisory Board Company
