Health IT

Dear Usman Raza,
I would suggest looking at http://www.ushahidi.com/ for crowdsourced crisis information which can be useful for coordination. I hope it helps with your efforts.


Vincent Njoroge

*sent from iPhone

Hi All,

Thanks Usman for starting this discussion. We've compiled some resources here: http://www.ghdonline.org/disaster-relief/ including some of the lessons learned for Health IT following the April panel discussion: Health IT for Disaster Relief and Rebuilding: Lessons from post-earthquake Haiti (need for coordination was and still is priority #1).

We hope that those of you involved in rolling out or maintaining IT solutions on the ground during disaster relief efforts share their info here. Thank you, Sophie

Usman,
I also found this article which might be of interest

Use of mobile phones in an emergency reporting system for infectious disease surveillance after the Sichuan earthquake in China

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/08-060905/en/print.html

Thanks Joaquin and everyone else for sharing these useful resources. We have started using Ushahidi to track our own relief efforts at the moment, and to this we will be adding partner organizations as we go along.

Looking through various resources, I found several types of flood incident maps (and not many for mapping relief efforts). What I am seeing is that there is no single unified map/site which is coordinating all major efforts in the country, perhaps because the national authority for disaster management has itself not been able to coordinate effectively. Obviously,
the lesson here is that such systems should be in place before the disaster. Right now it seems like several different organizations are hastily trying to setup these systems, perhaps with little standardization.

Thanks again,
For those interested, we are regularly updating our website (chs.prime.edu.pk) with our relief activities.

Usman Raza
http://www.linkedin.com/in/uraza

Hi everyone,

I shared this the announcement of our new Pakistan Relief Toolkit with the GHDonline admins and they suggested I posted. So here it is:

K4Health Pakistan Relief Toolkit (http://www.k4health.org/toolkits/pakistan-relief)is a one-stop source for information that will help health workers respond to the flood relief efforts underway in the country. The toolkit covers the vital sectors in emergencies, including health, water and sanitation, food security, and shelter. It also covers key field activities supporting the operations, such as logistics. The toolkit is accessible online, but K4Health will also be uploading it to flash drives so that those on the front line can access the information where Internet connectivity is lacking.

I hope you find it useful!

Best,
Chris Rottler