Abstract

Every day, the people of Malawi’s rural communities have to make health decisions with profound ramifications on themselves and their families. When seeing a clinician means walking for three hours but not seeing one could mean death, having no medical expertise is leaving people feeling helpless and stressful. Often the wrong decision is made and has fatal consequences.

Similarly, decision makers passionately working to improve their people’s health are making the best decisions they can, but are left frustrated and saddened by needing to do it with minimal technical support, compared to the developed world where medical professionals can cross-check digital databases.

Health facilities are constantly under-staffed and over-capacity with a large percentage of patients present when they do not need to be (poor health education means they are unable to triage the difference between a headache from dehydration vs. a malaria symptom). There are also patients who turn up too late in the illness cycle, reluctant to take a day off work to walk 3 hours, wait 3 hours for a 7-minute consultation to then walk back home.

As such, Project Everest is conducting an endorsed and ethically approved Research Protocol. The purpose of the Research Protocol is to validate if a potential USSD system is medically accurate and usable for both patients and clinicians. In order to develop the accuracy, 385 tightly controlled data points must be collected to inform the initial algorithm. This will then form the basis of the four-stage research Protocol.

The first stage of the research protocol focuses on patient symptom interpretation and will be carried out through the use of paper surveys for both patients and clinicians. Without this initial data, we will be unable to validate accuracy of the algorithm.