Thursday, August 27, 2009

SMS to check on the efficacy of drugs on the Nigerian market

Background
A Team of Youth is developing a technology to use SMS to check on the efficacy of drugs on the Nigerian market. Consumers can send SMS to the platform to check on the efficacy of a drug, and then a reply would be sent to them indicating the genuineness or otherwise of the drug. And create a comprehensive support system for HIV positive patients.

This project aims at curbing the menace of fake drugs on the Nigerian market and to safeguard the health of Nation and also focuses on increasing communication between doctors and patients because this is an issue identified by both doctors and patients as being one in which assistance was needed.

Our concept is relatively simple, a server sends out text messages to patients to remind them to take their individual daily pills, refill their prescriptions and attend their doctor appointments. Patients respond to the individual pill reminders to either confirm that they have taken their medication or if they were unable to then they identify the reason they did not. Patients who respond to their texts 50% or more of the time will be awarded a small prize every month such as airtime, phones, gift vouchers and other incentives.

We are planning to pilot the service out of the Specialist Hospital Abuja and NAFDAC with a cohort of 10,000 patients that have already failed first line therapy and been identified as having issues with adherence. We wish to run the pilot for about 4 months starting in mid-May and we will use this to prove that patients actually benefit from this type of service. During this phase we will be scaling up and improving the system and we plan to increase the availability of our system and increase the total number of patients enrolled.

2. Problem Statement
Many factors contribute to patients not taking their medication when prescribed, including adverse side effects, forgetfulness, inconvenience, lack of knowledge, etc. It takes long time to check on the efficacy of drugs on the Nigerian market. Don't know the genuineness of drug. This project aims to correct these interferences in the following ways:

Users will be able to subscribe to our service (free of charge) to receive reminders every day at the time the meds should be taken (even taking medications 20 out of sync with daily routine can cause problems such as resistance)
Although we cant alleviate undesirable side effects from the medication we hope to offer some form of incentive by offering rewards (at first free air time, phones, etc but to make it more sustainable we will move towards ringtone, wallpapers, games, etc that could be downloaded to their phones
Sometimes all that is needed is just a friendly reminder. So, patients will also be able to get their reminders in different forms (such as jokes, horoscopes, poems, etc. This helps to protect a patient's confidentiality)
We are also looking at creating an educational feature. By sending and SMS with a key word (such as HIV facts) they will get a response with a list they can pick from, which will then send another SMS with said facts
Send information of drugs genuineness/addresses etc.
3. Goals of the new System
Goals of the new system:

SMS must become the primary notification message type. Drug consumers and HIV Patients must get their reminders every day, on time.
Patients must be able to update their info via SMS
We must be able to send out high volume SMS. Starting pilot would be 500 a day
All notifications must be logged
We must have the option to create redirect SMS's for various reasons (such as patients asking questions, receiving incentive gifts, updating records, etc)
In closing, request AxtiveXperts for donating a license to our project. NGO, GOVT and individual to donate money for this project. The money we will save will be redirected to other useful purposes (such as buying a computer). Your companies desire to help us gives us all hope for a successful project that will hopefully help thousands, of peoples suffering from AIDS/taken fake drugs in Nigeria.

For More Details About Messaging and BulkSms visit http://www.routesms.com/

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