We connected three reading clinics (Hospital de Hassan, Cabinet de Radiologie and Dr. Benjelloun) in Casablanca this week. Getting them up and running and trained were, as always, a piece of a cake but it had to be in French this timeJ
We also took the ultrasound devices and our newly developed prototype of encryption software that we have installed on the Sony phones with us out to the countryside. Exciting and a little scary to see if it would work as we had planned. As far as we know, no one has ever sent ultrasound studies via encrypted cellphones before. We visited the three villages where the trial is going to take place, Ribat El Kheir, Boulemane and Qulmes. It worked! Even in the most remote locations we got it to work. The data transmission time was around 2-6 second per image in all three locations. We can live with that. The villages are very poor. In this area 2-3% of the women and their babies die during childbirth. Dr. Melouf one of our volunteers from Hospital de Hassan in Fez told us about two difficult cases he had this week. Two women, pregnant in week 24 and week 28, had breast cancer. One was 21 years-old and the other woman was 35 years-old. If he doesn’t terminate the pregnancy the women will die. However, in this area it’s not the women’s choice on who lives (mother or baby), it’s the mother’s parents and her husband’s parents that determine who should live. This is the reality and the daily life for the doctors and people in this region. We also met with the Health Minister of Rabat (the capital region of Morocco) Dr. Salaeddine Bennani. We received a government formal green light on the project.
What’s next? Next comes training of all the doctors and users that will participate in the trial in ultrasound scanning, our technology, the workflows and the medical protocol. We are getting closer and closer.
Making it work. John is using a shaver to get the SIM card
to fint in the phones programmed to encrypt the data from the ultrasound device to the Internet.
Our COO & Co-Founder Johanna Wollert Melin with the health minister in Rabat Dr. Benani.
Our project manager Dagmar Nuber and professor Hekmat from
the hospital In Fes one of our dedicated volunteering physicians.