A new application designed by two doctors from South Africa could help with patient assessments.
Two doctors have created an mhealth app that has been designed to help overburdened and over-stressed nurses and EMS healthcare workers to be able to better assess the needs of patients in South Africa emergency centers.
The doctors, from Cape Town, are named Yaseen Khan and Mohammed Dalwai, from the Open Medicine Project of South Africa.
Their mhealth application has been named the “Mobile Triage App” and it has been created so that emergency medical services (EMS) staff and nurses will be able to more quickly and accurately assess patients and then sort their needs into priority based on the urgency of their condition. This is meant to help to speed along the triage process without sacrificing the quality of the care that is being provided to the patients.
The mhealth app helps those performing triage to decide exactly how ill a person is, for treatment in the right order.
According to Dr. Kahn, “Emergency units are busy throughout the world and often we don’t find patients that are ill but this particular application helps a nurse in those settings accurately and safely identify who is ill and who is not that ill.”
The two doctors recently traveled to New York and have since returned. There, they had been finalists in the Echoing Green Fellowship contest for the Open Medicine Projects category. This was a highly involved process in which the development of the application was greatly and regularly monitored and assessed.
Dr. Kahn explained that he found the competition to be quite tough. The organizers from the Echoing Green Fellowship conducted thorough and continual assessments of the development and performance capabilities and potential of the mobile health application. He explained that “They screen you to some degree, we spent quite a few days in serial interviews and pitching sessions and they look for products that target high burden issues.”
The hope is that this mhealth app will be used to take some of the pressure off the workers who perform the vital triage tasks at emergency units in South Africa as well as other parts of the world.
