Grand Challenges in TB Control

[Shashank Garg]

Hello Jørn and the OpenXdata Community,

On behalf of HANDSREL it gives me great pleasure to share with you the news that we have just won a competitive grant through a programme called "Grand Challenges in TB Control" which is jointly funded by USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This India-specific programme in TB Control is managed by IKP Knowledge Park Limited, a local incubator.

Why is TB important in India?

TB is an infectious disease whose economic burden is in excess of US$3 billion per annum in India. India and China account for almost 40% of the world's TB burden with India accounting for almost 25%. Almost 1.4 million new cases of TB are detected and over 370,000 people die from TB every year in India.

TB is curable if detected early and if the patient undergoes treatment for a duration of 6 months. The Indian Government provides fully subsidized treatment. However, despite all efforts, a significant number of patients do not complete TB treatment and develop more virulent forms of TB, multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extreme-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB). While the average cost incurred by the Government to provide basic TB treatment is roughly $100 - 150 per person per year, the average cost incurred in treating MDR-TB is in excess of $6,000 and XDR-TB costs even higher.

We have been funded to develop a mobile workflows-based solution to improve the monitoring of adherence to TB treatment.

While the size of the Phase-I grant is quite modest, this funding will be used to develop proof-of-concept solutions. We intend to work towards a Phase-II grant which is quite substantial but which will be much more selective. Only 4 or 5 projects from Phase-I will be funded in Phase II and this funding will provide us the ability to scale up from the proof-of-concept stage to a larger pilot and its eventual deployment in the national TB effort.

We are particularly pleased that several jury members singled us out for presenting one of the most highly innovative proposals. Recognition amongst our peers will motivate us to make important contributions towards improving TB treatment adherence.

This is a collaborative initiative in which HANDSREL will develop the mobile solution and Dr. Isha Garg's team at St. John's Medical College will provide the domain knowledge and the test sites.

Just wanted to share this with you and the OpenXdata Community that this will be a large application deployment in Public Health. The OpenXdata Platform will form an important core component of our application but it will also incorporate other technologies such as ODK for Android devices, Workflows, EHR etc.

Best wishes and regards,

Shashank

_____________________________________________________________
Dr. Shashank Garg, PhD
CEO
Handheld Solutions & Research Labs [HANDSREL]
36, 20th Main 1st Cross, 1st Stage BTM Layout, Bangalore - 560068 [India]
Email: shasha...@handsrel.com, garg.s...@gmail.com
URL: http://handsrel.com/

2007-Fellow, Digital Vision Program, Stanford University
______________________________________________________________

[Jørn Ivar Klungsøyr]

Hi Shashank,

This is very good news!

Congratulations!

It will be exciting to follow the progress of your work and how this can help improve TB programmes!

Have a great day and thank you very much for sharing the news!

Best

Jørn

 

____________________________________________________________________________
Jørn Klungsøyr - openXdata - Centre for International Health, University of Bergen, Norway - www.openxdata.org / www.cih.uib.no
Mobile: +4791365731, Skype/GoogleTalk: jornklung Alternative email: jorn.klungsoyr {at} gmail.com
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[Dagmar Timler]

Congratulations! It sounds like an interesting project. Please let us know how the project develops.

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[Peter Wakholi]

Dear Shashank,

Congratulations Indeed. We (at OMNI-Tech - http://omnitech.co.ug/) have done some more work on workflows. Lets have a chat about how we can be of help.

Best regards,

Peter

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Dr Peter Khisa Wakholi (PHD)

Lecturer, School of Computing and Informatics Technology

Room 307 Block A, COCIS
Makerere University

P.O.Box 7062 Kampala, UGANDA

Tel: +256-41-4540628

Fax: +256-41-540620

Skype ID: p.khisa

Linked in Profile: ug.linkedin.com/pub/peter-wakholi/26/13/167/

[Shashank Garg]

Dear Peter,

Thanks for your good wishes and kind offer to help with the workflows. We will certainly be in touch with you on that. Current thinking is to go with Yawl, though there is also some temptation to look at BPMN systems like Intalio and Enhydra Shark etc. So your insights will be very valuable.

Regards,

Shashank