A Hand-Held System Usable by Rural Health Workers for Medical Decision-Making

Abstract

A great part of the world’s population is cured by rural health workers who also collect data for epidemiological studies; these workers have a low level of medical training and work in a poor technical environment. At the request of an international humanitarian organization (Médecins Sans Frontières), we have developed an integrated system (TROPICAID) based on a hand-held computer, designed to increase rural health workers’ effectiveness. The software is easy to use, allowing access to an internal data base on 60 drugs. The decision making module analyzes the patient’s parameters and indicates possible diagnoses and relevant treatments. The system knows 24-0 diagnoses. In addition, individual medical data can be collected for elementary statistical analysis. The computer, sturdy and compact, runs on battery power rechargeable by a solar panel. Program and data are stored in high capacity EPROMs (320 K bytes). This system is currently being evaluated in several places in Chad, The first results show that this system is intensively used and gives valuable information to the user.