eHealth Africa at Africa Geospatial Forum

eHealth Africa took part in the Africa Geospatial Forum in December of 2014. eHealth’s Frank Salet and Michael Egbe were featured presenters at the forum. Respectively, they presented on Public Health Mapping for Supporting Polio Eradication, and Mapping Nigeria on Open Street Maps (OSM). 

Through examples from their own work in the field and through case studies, they used their expertise to show how adding and drawing accurate data through OSM is vital for immunization campaigns and general healthcare response time, especially in rural areas.

eHealth Africa was honored to be a part of this event, and to present techniques and information alongside our other partners for bettering healthcare response in Africa.

Read the whole report about the forum by clicking here.

2015 Netexplo Forum

eHealth Africa’s Sense Ebola Followup mobile app won the innovation award at the 2015 Netexplo Forum. eHealth Africa’s director and co-founder Evelyn Castle joined other winners of the innovation award on stage to discuss their health tech solutions, and to officially accept their awards (end of video).

When the Ministry of Health in Nigeria called on eHealth Africa to give aid to the outbreak of Ebola in 2014, Sense Ebola Followup was created. Once put into use, this new tool was able to cut down healthcare response time to new cases of Ebola by days at a time, effectively fighting the outbreak and saving lives.

Click here to watch the video.

Project Sense Takes Vital Steps To End Ebola

eHealth Africa has been using technology to strengthen health systems in West Africa for 5 years. When the Ebola outbreak reached Lagos, the Nigerian government called on eHealth Africa to assist in providing immediate emergency support.

The result was the creation of Project Sense, an award-winning open source platform based on lightweight, cutting edge mobile and web technologies (including Angular JS and CouchDB). This platform was designed to support emergency management staff by tracing people who had come into contact with a person infected by ebola. This enabled a critical step in exponentially increasing the speed of response and containing the spread of infection.

Thanks to round-the-clock efforts by staff and their counterparts, eHealth Africa was able to put together a prototype of Project Sense in just 3 days. Staff on the ground then worked with the dedicated contact tracing teams to customize and deploy. The timely and effective contact tracing effort quickly grew to include over a thousand contacts, and the Nigerian ebola outbreak was halted at 20 cases.

This eHealth platform is now being implemented to meet the surveillance and response challenges in the remaining countries effected by ebola in West Africa. With the platform’s track record and the dedicated efforts of staff and other health workers, we hope to see the ebola outbreak stopped for good.