Imagine the scene of a disaster. It’s pandemonium. After giving first aid to a victim and seeking refuge behind a wreck, you manage to flip your smartphone and dial the emergency number. While the reception is failing and no one picks up, what would you do? According to a Red Cross survey, many would post a distress call on Facebook or Twitter. Others would perhaps search for the location of the nearest emergency room. If you’re in a developed country, you’d probably do the latter by accessing an app like USHospFinder, but if you dwell in a country which government even lack information on where basic health care is located, things get complicated.
As of today, there is no such thing as a common, exhaustive and public inventory of emergency health care around the world. About 200 countries in the world have their own (sometimes shared) data sets. While organizations like the International Hospital Federation and the World Health Organization start to address this problem, I’d like to see a crowdsourced effort where the general public feeds the location of hospitals to an open and free database. I call this project ”Safeguarding Health Care Worldwide.”
Running on an open source platform like Ushahidi, with a kick of Wikipedia and WordPress, the project’s web interface would allow anyone, anywhere, anytime – medical workers and Plain Jane – to via a map add, edit or remove the location of (and any other information about) a hospital, a medical facility, an ambulance point, etc. Concept and dynamics are yet to be elaborated, but here’s a draft prototype of what the front-end could look like:
While the interface would adapt to different platforms (desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones), data should be editable and accessible via low bandwidth devices, e.g. a Nokia 3210 (a great phone by the way). Ideally a user should be able to send and retrieve information about health care in his or her proximity via text messages (SMS). This would, however, require quite a bit of coding as well as partnering with carriers and telcos.
One could argue that governments around the globe, in particular those who have a passion for e-government solutions, already should have chipped-in here. It should also be a no-brainer for relief organizations and first responders, assisting those affected by sudden onset emergencies, to share their data. Pending this and that, the billion dollar question however remains: What would be the incentive for Average Joe to walk out the door and map a hospital?
