How does Sendinel work right now?

Actually, we have not yet talked about the whole concept of Sendinel. So it’s time to do that!

Sendinel generally aims to improve the communication between clinics and patients. Clinics are the entrance point to the South-African health system. If somebody is sick, that person goes to a clinic and is examined and treated by a nurse. On a regular basis, specialists visit the clinic (for example once a week). If the person has to be operated, the person is transferred to the hospital. Clinics are free of charge for all patients. So what we want to do is to help the clinic staff contacting the patients. The supported communication channel will be SMS or computer-generated phone calls to the patients’ mobile phones.


Patients can receive information from the clinic via SMS and Phone Call

We focus on 4 main use cases:
• When lab results arrive, patients should be informed that they can come to the clinic to pick them up.
• Sometimes people forget appointments they have with the clinic. Appointments are given to chronic patients or for vaccinations (especially for children). When the appointments are forgotten, the intake of medicine may be interrupted or there may be no vaccination. So the clinic staff can set-up a reminder in Sendinel. One day before the appointment, the patient will be reminded of the appointment.
• It sometimes happens that not enough medicine is present at the clinic. So when the medicine arrives the clinic should be able to inform all patients who are waiting for it.
• The clinic sometimes wants to inform a larger group of people about the same topic. For example, all pregnant women should be informed about a gymnastics training. So they can create an information group "information for pregnant women" and subscribe all pregnant women to it. Then all subscribers will receive the messages that the clinic staff writes to that information group.

Right now our main menu looks like this:



We plan to release Sendinel on the 5th of May with all the above described features.

A more formal description of the features is available at Google Docs here and in pdf format here.

The research trip to South Africa

As mentioned earlier we have been on a research trip to the Agincourt clinic in Mpumalanga, South Africa from March 21 to March 29 2010. Following is a summary of the trip and the conclusions we made.



What we have done
At the first day, we set up the Sendinel server and connected it to the local network. This enabled us to conduct our user research under the proper conditions.

We tested how users react to Sendinel and tried to find out which features were accepted by the patients and staff. Furthermore we evaluated various input methods and the understandability of computerized voice calls. We also tested the reminder service. Sendinel informs patients about their next appointment at the clinic via their mobile phone.

Since many languages are spoken in South Africa (there are 11 official langauges), we tried to find out which languages should be supported by systems used in that region. We also interviewed all participants about their usage of technology. In total, about 60 people participated in our user research.

On the last day we made Sendinel available from all computers at the clinic and trained the nurses on how to use it. For example we showed them how to send messages to groups of subscribers like informing all pregnant women if a gynecologist is going to be at the clinic.



Conclusions
Generally all participants were excited about the possibility to remind patients of appointments and vaccinations.

The interviews with the patients of the clinic showed, that nearly everyone owns a mobile phone. We also learned that internet usage is not widely spread. So we decided to focus on contacting patients via SMS or telephone calls.

During user research we realized that only the nurses of the clinic are trained well enough to use the computer. A lot of the patients that participated in our tests had never used a computer before. Therefore we decided that the target users of our system should not be the patients themselves, but the clinic staff.



We had previously planned to provide the patients with a knowledge base holding health related information. Since patients are no longer our target user group, we decided to drop that part.

The clinic staff speaks English fluently, so this is what we chose as the main language for Sendinel. However it can easily be adapted to other languages. For example in Agincourt we are considering to send messages to the patients in Tsonga, the local language.



What happens next?
We are preparing to release Sendinel as an Open Source project in May 2010. In the process, we will use the information gathered during the research trip to improve the system. We also plan to further engage third parties to pursue the development of Sendinel after the end of the bachelor project in June 2010.

You may also view and download a more formal version of this travel report in pdf format here.