Mike McKay

Mike McKay started a discussion "Field Based HIV Testing & Counseling" in the Health IT community.

In Malawi we (Baobab) have been guiding and collecting data for HIV testing and counseling sessions using touchscreen clinical workstations at static HTC sites. But now fewer people are coming to the HTC centers (probably because most nearby residents have already been tested) and our partner is performing the majority of tests in the field. The field strategy uses a combination of motorcycles, tents, mobile testing vans and paper forms. We are working with them ...

Mike McKay replied to "Wireless networking where electricity is scarce" in the Health IT community.

In Malawi we have built a fairly long distance wireless link using off the shelf equipment. A rural hospital was in need of connectivity so we welded together an 18 meter steel tower and put it on a nearby hilltop. We then added an off the shelf 48V windmill to power 4, 12 volt solar batteries. Finally we put a mikrotik router with one 802.11 radio pointed at another health center 30 kilometers away (which ...

Mike McKay replied to "Blog Post on Stop the Stockouts for Health IT" in the Health IT community.

Ushahidi is a fantastic system with an amazing set of developers, most of whom live in Africa. It can and has already been used to monitor disease outbreaks as well as doing election monitoring and other very needful tasks. I was really excited to hear that it is being used for stockouts. One question though. Everyone says that FrontlineSMS is open source, but the source code is not freely available for download on the web. ...

Mike McKay replied to "Blog Post on Stop the Stockouts for Health IT" in the Health IT community.

Thanks Isaac. I think in this case "perception is reality", and the perception has stuck with FrontlineSMS for a long time. Glad to hear that you guys are trying to change that. I don't accept the argument that keeping something closed at the beginning makes a project more open in the long run, but we can agree to disagree on that. A few suggestions: There should be a link from the FrontlineSMS website to sourceforge ...