MIT Sana

Cambridge, MA, USA

Android smartphones are used for detecting cataracts in Brazil; identification, management, and treatment of patients with hypertension in the Philippines; assessing patients following surgery in Swaziland; offering home telemonitoring consultations in Greece; customizing algorithms to screen for malaria in Sierra Leone; hearing and melanoma screening in Brazil and all of that via Massachusetts Institute of Technology mobile health platform called Sana.

ERIC WINKLER OPENED THE WORKSHOP

MIT has developed its own open-source mobile telehealth system called Sana. It is designed for Android smartphones to improve the quality of care in resource-poor settings. The founder team teaches at MIT and runs the workshop with hands-on experience through which they get free code to implement. It is a non-profit academic platform that can be acquired free of charge from this address: http://sana.mit.edu/platform/download/.

Sana is a standard-focused open-source system that supports audio, images, location-based data, text, and in the future, video. Sana's front-end for data and media capture is accessible through a fully programmable workflow interface. The back-end provides an intuitive user interface for the management of medical media. Sana was built to be integrated with OpenMRS and other commonly used medical record systems for portability. In addition, the system infrastructure and design allow for modularity and interoperation.

Sana is in the early stage of development but attracted my attention as the team is trying to address the needs of people in developing nations. It was helpful to know what those challenges are and how they plan to tackle them. They run projects in low-income countries like India, Brazil, Philippines, Africa, Greece (?!?), Columbia, Sierra Leone, etc. Here is the complete list of projects and 'needs' perceived as potentially addressable by mobile technology.

HELPING PEOPLE WITH HEART LOSS VIA SMARTPHONE PLATFORM

I participated for only two days and got to know more about their projects in Brazil. They are trying to address two medical conditions: hearing loss screening through cell phones and melanoma detection. Both projects are co-funded by the Brazilian government and MIT. Their business model is in connecting specialists with the outpatient nurse practitioners – in essence, it revolves around teleconsultations. Still, it will evolve according to local needs and implementation strategies.

I became a member of MIT Sana, as I support low-tech interventions in the developing world. Healthcare innovation shouldn't be restricted to the rich world only - on the contrary, the "first world countries" can learn a great deal from the less fortunate ones as "necessity gives birth to innovation". In the following years, I will work tighter with Sana to be in touch with the development of telehealth at the grassroots level around the globe.