KEMR Clinical Data Remote Access Tool

Allow data sharing of client data across multiple care facilities while respecting client privacy and facility data ownership

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Inspiration

Data ownership in the medical field is such a big deal that its the far most largest barrier to data sharing across different programs. This forces clients who are in transit and wish to seek medical care when away from their primary care facilities to carry pieces of this data on their person which is extremely risky more so for clients on treatment for life changing ailments and the stigma associated with it. Clients on ARV treatments mostly do not know what regimen they are following and are mostly left explaining to the healthcare worker how the pill tube containing the tablets looks like which make it incredibly difficult for them to get effective care. This is multiplied by a factor of magnitude when dealing with criminalized key populations who are not only limited to the places they can receive medical care but do to the nature of their work do not carry any identification documents for fear of arrest. This group mostly just memorize the identifier they use for care at their respective facility which does not really help when receiving care from a facility other than there parent one. So we thought how good would it be if we could build an application that allows client data to be shared in real time in a federated manner while respecting facility data ownership

What it does

We have build a windows based desktop application that connects to the facility instance of KEMR and using message routing technology can push requests made from one app to all apps which in turn query their respective KEMR DBs for the supplied identifier returning a result either as a simple '0' when nothing is found or a JSON payload when data is found

How we built it

C# winform and RabbitMQ

Challenges we ran into

  1. Lack of capable hardware in our test facilities
  2. Lack of power backups in areas prone to power loss
  3. Lack of internet
  4. Users forgetting to open the app

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to share once siloed data from its parent facility to a client's transit point of care is a game changer that will improve the level of care given to this clients adding to a better quality of life

What we learned

Technology is only as good as the impact it makes, it should never be about technical showcasing but impact assessment

What's next for KEMR Clinical Data Remote Access Tool

  1. Convert the app into a .net core service that can run on the ubuntu platform negating the need for manual start.
  2. Migrate the technology into an Android App to assist clinicians out in the field to have access to treatment data when conducting outreaches away from the facilities.
  3. Build a dashboard that can show metrics of client migration across programs to be better equipped to serve them in the future.

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