By Samita Thapa and Sara Pitcairn

The possibilities for 3D printing are endless. While this may scare some of us, the potential for innovation is exactly what excites us here at TechChange! Imagine being able to quickly manufacture reconstruction materials for disaster response, 3D print homes in refugee camps, or 3D print a human heart to save a life.

But this cutting-edge innovation can also seem difficult to wrap your head around. How does it work? How do you begin? Here is an example of how an idea can become a product through 3D printing:

Dr. Boris Paskhover at the Yale School of Medicine saw a need for a portable transnasal laryngoscope with image and video capture capabilities. A transnasal laryngoscope is a handheld medical device that allows Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) physicians to examine a patient’s voice box and diagnose and treat ENT disorders (such as cancer of the throat or thyroid). But the equipment that captures images and videos from a laryngoscope, an endoscopic tower, is expensive and difficult to transport, making it infeasible for use outside of a hospital setting.

Laryngoscope and Endoscopic Tower

Imagine
Dr. Paskhover imagined an easier way to visualize the results of a laryngoscope examination. By using his Phone camera and an app called Luma to produce higher quality video and pictures, he could see the results anywhere. To start with, he created a makeshift attachment to secure a laryngoscope to his iPhone case. But ideally, he imagined a more robust solution for his work in rural settings outside the U.S.

Dr. Paskhover's make-shift  attachment for his iPhone 4 case

Dr. Paskhover’s make-shift attachment for his iPhone 4 case

Design
He worked with Sara Pitcairn, TechChange’s Co-Director of Instructional Design, during her senior year at Yale University to bring his idea to life. Through an iterative, human-centered design process, Sara modeled, prototyped and 3D printed an iPhone case with an interface aligning the eyepiece of a laryngoscope with an iPhone camera. The iphone case allowed Dr. Paskhover to capture high-quality photos and videos of his exams with patients without the need for an endoscopic tower.

Designing and testing the 3D printed iPhone case

3D Print

See the 3D printed iPhone case in action:

This is one of many examples of how 3D printing is helping fill gaps that exist in healthcare. There are countless applications in other fields, and especially in disaster response and international development.

Do you have other examples of how 3D printing is being used in your communities? Share them with us in the comments section or tweet at us @TechChange

If you are are interested in learning more about the potential 3D printing offers in your field, join Sara in our upcoming course on 3D Printing for Social Good. We will look at applications of 3D printing in a variety of contexts, along with the challenges and opportunities as the field continues to advance. After the four weeks of the course, you will have a solid understanding of 3D printing so that you can see its potential for your field of practice. We will look at case studies and examples of where 3D printing is being used today and will help you find a maker community, as well as connect you with experts using 3D printing for social good.

The course begins on May 4, we hope you can join us!

By: Carolyn Moore and Lesley-Anne Long
Photo credit: Moses Khanu

Since the launch of the first free Training Health Workers for Ebola webinar series in October 2014, we have seen hundreds of members of the global health community come together to share vital, timely information to save lives and prevent the spread of the disease. This real-time and archived delivery of information has been critical to the continued response. We are excited to be working with partners, IntraHealth International, Ebola Alert, and TechChange, to continue growing this community as the response continues and countries begin to rebuild from the outbreak.

A team of organizations, led by mPowering Frontline Health Workers and IntraHealth International, are coming together to share tools and information on how to support health workers responding to and rebuilding from the Ebola crisis.

Please join us in a three-part webinar series beginning April 1.

Health workers in West Africa have been responding to Ebola since 2013, and, according to the latest WHO situation report, the pace of the outbreak is beginning to decline. This calls for relief and celebration. However, this is far from final for those who have been affected by Ebola.

The virus has left indelible marks on their lives, and their stories are many and severe:

The Ebola situation is once more improving in terms of infection rate, but the socio-economic needs are enormous.” (Moses Khanu, Pastor, Sierra Leone)

What comes next for Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three most affected countries? And how can countries nearby and in the region plan for future potentially deadly outbreaks?

Health workers remain at the center of community response and support. At the same time, the governments and international organizations that support health workers are seeking answers for how they can restore health services in West Africa, strengthen health systems, and prepare for future health emergencies.

What’s next for Ebola affected countries?
Many organizations are working closely with all actors across the health sector. In our second series of Training Health Workers for Ebola webinars in April, we will have a group of colleagues who have been working in the affected countries talking about lessons learned and planning for rebuilding and strengthening health systems.

We invite you to join the discussion in the webinars.

Reviewing lessons learned, and looking ahead
These webinars will focus on tools and strategies that health workers, as well as the governments and organizations that support them, can use to continue the response, protect their communities and help rebuild health systems. Free training and information resources are concurrently being posted in the Ebola Resource Center http://www.hrhebolaresources.org/

Please join us in the webinars! Here are the details:

Webinar Schedule:
April 1: Working with Youth, Volunteers, and Vulnerable Populations
April 8: Community Mobilization and Preparedness Planning
April 15: Effective Use of Data

All live sessions will be held from 10.00 – 11.00am EDT.

These webinars will bring together more than 15 international health organizations, led by mPowering Frontline Health Workers and IntraHealth International.

Registration and more information are available here. The webinars are open to all, and will build upon the presentations and discussion in the first Training Health Workers for Ebola series.

All of the webinars will be available for viewing at www.techchange.org after the air dates.

The webinar series has been made possible by the generous support of the USAID-supported Health Communication Capacity Collaborative.

In honor of World AIDS Day 2014, we celebrate several TechChange alumni who are heroes in the front lines of fighting HIV and AIDS across the world. From their communities in San Francisco, Vietnam, Malawi, South Africa, and Zambia, these extraordinary individuals are using mHealth technology, online training for HIV preventing, and more to save lives with HIV awareness campaigns through online trainings and SMS campaigns, Android mobile apps for accurately prescribing antiretroviral medication, and more. Check out the top five ways TechChange alumni are using technology to fight HIV.

1. Encouraging HIV testing and care in Vietnam with mHealth gamification programs
Caroline Francis and her team across FHI 360 Vietnam have launched mHealth pilot programs to encourage HIV testing and care maintenance through gamification with mobile phones. In their programs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, mHealth is a key strategy for FHI 360 “to incentivize health-seeking actions, increase the timeliness of data collection, improve patient communications, and document system-client interactions. MHealth can also facilitate workforce development through task shifting, performance support, and human resources management.”

Check out this video on their “Fansipan Challenge” mHealth pilot program here.

2. Promoting HIV support group and health management classes with SMS reminders
In her blog post on “mHealth: Healthcare Reaching Remote Places with Mobile Phones and SMS”, Reverend Neelley Hicks describes the success of a community health worker’s use of SMS messages to remind HIV+ members of a community in Malawi to attend support group and HIV health management classes. The significance of reaching these program beneficiaries was not small, as “community health workers often must walk miles to find someone only to learn they are away. But the mobile phones stay with the person – making them much easier to reach.”

Mercy-mHealth-United-Methodist-Communications

Mercy (pictured with Maeghan Ray Orton from Medic Mobile) at UMCom workshop in Malawi

3. Scaling HIV Prevention in California via eLearning
A&PI (Asian and Pacific Islander) Wellness Center, a San Francisco-based organization with that started to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis in A&PI communities beginning in the late 1980s, collaborated with Project Inform and TechChange to develop the California Statewide Training and Education Program (CSTEP), a curriculum that sets the standard in HIV treatment and technically and culturally competent training for clinical and non-clinical providers working in the HIV field. The A&PI Wellness Center works to address the health needs of marginalized and vulnerable groups, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or immigration status.

To register for these free online courses on HIV prevention training, please click here.

4. Correctly prescribing HIV antiretrovirals (AVR) drugs with an Android smartphone mobile app in South Africa

To help clinicians to correctly prescribe antiretrovirals, Dr. Musaed Abrahams, an alumnus of our mHealth – Mobile Phones for Public Health online course, has launched a mobile app for managing antriretroviral treatment (ARV) medication in South Africa.

The Aviro HIV mobile app acts as a virtual mentor for clinicians to easily consult for proper ARV (Anti-retroviral) initiation and treatment during the patient consult. Designed for Android and based on the current South African guidelines, it provides real-time, immediate feedback and guidance for the clinician, so that excellent and reliable care can be delivered to every patient. Following a care checklist, it gives clinical prompts aiming to educate and raise the standard of patient care.

Download the Aviro Android app on the Google Play store here.

5. Advocating for reproductive health education in Zambia with SMS
After taking several online courses with TechChange, Priscilla Chomba-Kinywa created a SMS solution called U-Report to promote sex education to prevent HIV in Zambia among youth. She incorporated the feedback from Zambian youth in the process of building out this campaign and program. The first year of the program’s pilot in 2 provinces had 50,000 young people voluntarily sign up and engage the 24/7 trained counselors by asking them questions on HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and other reproductive health issues.

Zambia-U-Report

Want to learn how you can use technology to address challenges such as HIV and other global challenges? Enroll in one of our online courses here and get $50 off any course with the coupon code, ENDAIDS2014, before December 5, 2014.

 

Frontline health workers in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia are responding to the largest Ebola outbreak in history. To protect themselves and their communities, health workers responding to Ebola need clear, reliable, and timely information on how to detect the disease, prevent its spread, and care for patients.

To respond to this crisis, mPowering Frontline Health Workers and IntraHealth International approached TechChange to deliver a free online webinar series on “Training Health Workers for Ebola—Protection, Detection, and Response”. In these webinars, more than 15 international and in-country health organizations will share information with participants on how to support health workers responding to Ebola. The four one-hour webinars will air on October 21, 23, 28, and 30, each starting at 10:00 am EDT.

The webinars are open to all, and we welcome participation from as diverse an audience as possible. This includes Ministries of Health, health workers, community leaders, program implementers (in-country and international), policy makers, and others. Health professionals from over 15 countries have already signed up, and participants represent government, health care facilities, international NGOs, and civil society, and other sectors.

The presentations and discussions in the webinars will (1) describe how to leverage available resources to train, support, and communicate with frontline health workers and others involved in the direct Ebola response through mobile technology; (2) consider ways to connect implementers to resources, collaborators, and sources of information; and (3) explore how to improve opportunities to enable implementers and programmers to share efforts, collaborate, and avoid duplication.

Webinar schedule:
October 21: Learning and information needs for frontline health workers
October 23: Health system support for frontline health workers
October 28: Community mobilization and interactions with clients
October 30: Data to support effective response and case management

All live sessions will be held from 10.00-11.00am EDT. For those who cannot attend the webinar sessions live, all webinars will be recorded and available here after the air dates.

These webinars are being supported by a 4-week discussion in the Health Information for All (HIFA) forums and we invite you to join and add your views. In addition, IntraHealth and mPowering are launching an online Ebola Resource Center for participants and others to share messages, training content, guidance documents, and other information. This site will also be a place for programs to share information about their work and to connect to others for support, ideas and collaboration. The Ebola Resource Center will launch on October 21.

If you and/or your organization have content on Ebola that you would like to share in the Resource Center, please email Dave Potenziani at Intrahealth at dpotenziani [at] intrahealth [dot] org.

We look forward to meeting you in the webinars & invite you to participate in the conversations in the HIFA forum.

You can find the webinar page and registration information at https://www.techchange.org/live-events/training-health-workers-for-ebola/.

Please share this information on this webinar series information with anyone interested in responding to the Ebola outbreak.

Photo credit: BBC

The Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center (A&PI Wellness Center) partnered with TechChange to develop a two-part training course designed for clinical and non-clinical providers to provide HIV education in California. For the first time ever, these trainings combined both the self-paced and facilitated course structures. Participants will be asked to proceed at their own pace through the Articulate Storyline-based APIWC 101 course, before taking part in the four-week facilitated course that features chats with guest experts.



HIV Today – The Context
We have come a long way when it comes to HIV treatment. Thirty years of research and campaigns have transformed HIV from being a death sentence into a chronic condition that permits those who properly manage it to live relatively normal lives. The problem is, only one in four HIV-positive Americans currently follow all recommendations for managing HIV.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), only 25% of HIV-positive Americans reach viral suppression, the current end-goal of HIV treatment. This means that the other 75%, or roughly 825,000 of the 1.1 million Americans estimated to be HIV-positive, are not receiving the support they need to successfully navigate through the obstacles to seek care. As a result, these individuals are not getting the treatments they need to manage and maintain their personal health and consequently, have a greater risk of transmitting the virus to others.

Many agencies have encouraged use of the HIV Care Continuum, also called the HIV Treatment Cascade, as a tool to visualize the proportion of HIV-positive individuals engaged at each stage of care.

HIV Care Continuum

Source: AIDS.gov

This cascade shows an estimated percentage of how many people fall out of care at each step along the way to viral suppression. Nearly one in five HIV-positive Americans do not know their positive status, keeping them from engaging in the cascade at all. Of those that are initially linked to care, nearly half fall out of treatment before being prescribed antiretroviral therapy (ART).

Even more important than this cascade is the breakdown of HIV prevalence by race and sexual preference. African Americans, for example, bear the biggest burden. According to a 2013 CDC report, African Americans makes up 14% of the US population, accounting for 44% of Americans living with HIV. The burden is similarly unequal for other minorities and men who have sex with men (MSM).

CDC estimated rate of new HIV infections (2010)

source: CDC

These statistics highlight the need for responses tailored to the communities most affected by HIV; these groups are more likely to face poverty and racism, as well as distrust with the medical system. When societal challenges are combined with the challenges of navigating HIV, people tend to drop out of care. Diverse communities require varied responses that are culturally aware and take into account the needs of disenfranchised groups.

The Challenge of Scaling HIV Prevention
Response to HIV requires service providers to play clinical and non-clinical roles. Many counselors, social workers, advocates, lawyers, and clinicians frequently work with HIV-positive individuals and in the field of HIV prevention and treatment; it is vital that they understand both the medical and complex social realities faced by their clients.

Born out of a grassroots movement to combat the HIV/AIDS crisis in A&PI communities in the late 1980s, the A&PI Wellness Center works to address the health needs of marginalized and vulnerable groups, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or immigration status. In collaboration with Project Inform, the A&PI Wellness Center developed the California Statewide Training and Education Program (CSTEP), a curriculum that sets the standard in HIV treatment and technically and culturally competent training for clinical and non-clinical providers working in the HIV field.

An eLearning Solution

APIWC Module 1

Participants will advance to APIWC 201 upon completion of the first course (APIWC 101). Hosted on TechChange’s facilitated course platform, this online course will provide more in-depth information about barriers to care and supporting clients in a dynamic era of HIV treatment. The month-long 201 course integrates elements of the self-paced course into the facilitated learning environment – participants are able to review the 101 content as well as slides specifically produced for the 201 course, share their knowledge with other providers in the forums, and interact with experts during live events. The ability to work with experts is what really sets this training apart – participants hear from former presidential advisors on HIV policy, specialists in linking HIV-positive people to care, HIV trainers, and those with decades of experience researching the virus and advocating for those affected.

APIWC Guest Expert Dr. Cynthia Gomez

Participants are able to engage with experts such as Dr. Cynthia Gómez (pictured above) during live events. These events are recorded and made available for later review.

The content of both courses is available 24/7 so that providers are able to take part whenever their schedules allow, while the forums and weekly live sessions add a social dimension uncommon in online learning. As all participants have some experience with HIV prevention or treatment, this course provides a unique opportunity for collaborative learning; providers can learn from the experiences of one another, share resources, and strengthen their networks of HIV prevention and treatment specialists.

In the first month alone, the training attracted over 70 participants from a variety of organizations. Additionally, the combined course has little in the way of overhead costs and can easily be repeated or scaled for different audiences, making it a viable strategy for training providers across California, with the goal of improving health outcomes and supporting HIV-positive individuals as they move toward viral suppression.

To register for these free online courses on HIV prevention training, please click here.

Live session recording

Charlie Weems and Emily Fruchterman of TechChange record a live session at the TechChange recording studio in Washington, DC.

Emily Fruchterman, Catherine Shen, Charlie Weems, and the A&PI Wellness Center contributed to this blog post.

If your organization is interested in developing online training with TechChange, please contact info@techchange.org.

By Lauren Bailey, TC309: mHealth – Mobile Phones for Public Health alumna

Lauren Bailey

My final project for TechChange’s mHealth online course overlapped a final project for a master level global environmental health course. I’m currently working towards a Master of Public Health degree, concentrating in global environmental health, and specifically focusing in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). I recently became interested in mHealth and decided to do my global environmental health course project on mHealth in the WASH sector. Since I was new to mHealth, I kept the project simple, touching on some basics. This background document includes: (1) applications of mHealth in WASH; (2) case studies; and (3) recommendations.

Throughout TC309, I became increasingly interested in how mHealth can be applied to behavior change, a major component of reducing WASH-related illness. The mHealth online course has been a wonderful way to learn about the different applications of mHealth, the challenges and successes of programs, and the future possibilities of mHealth. I’ve been inspired by many of the articles, discussions, and live presentations and am now incorporating mHealth into my master’s thesis.

Here is the infographic I created, using Piktochart as part of my course project:

mHealth-in-WASH-infographic_Lauren Bailey

Highlights:

  1. Mobile phones offer a means to reach most at-risk populations, particularly those in rural areas, to change health outcomes.
  2. More individuals in most African countries will have access to a mobile phone than they will to an improved water source by 2013.
  3. Mobile phones have been deployed over the past decade as tools to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene.
  4. Client education and behavior change communication, data collection and reporting, financial transactions and incentives, and supply chain management are potential mHealth applications categories.

To read Lauren’s entire final project from the online course, mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health, please click here.

Interested in learning more about how mobile phones are impacting WASH, healthcare, and promoting health worldwide? Register now for our 4-week online on mHealth here.