The last days of August I flew to New Delhi with Nico to kick off an initial pilot of CDx.
CDx stands for Connected Diagnostics platform, a project we are developing for InSTEDD in partnership with FIND. The CDx Platform is an aggregator of medical diagnosis data, allowing different devices, health workers and organisations to store, visualise and generate epidemiologic reports.
We met with Tarak Shah, Tobias Broger and Chris Isaacs from FIND there, and visited the New Delhi Tuberculosis Centre facilities, in which Dr Hanif taught us how they diagnose and get informed about new TB cases in the country. We then went to one of the laboratories in there to connect one of its diagnostic devices to the CDx Platform, and ran some tests with a prototype device which directly connects to CDx for uploading test results.
In order to show the capabilities that CDx unleashes, we connected the platform with some spreadsheets that get automatically populated with new results, and we sent alerts of RIF-resistant patients via SMS to a clinician using MBuilder. We also simulated automatic calls to the patients to ask them to pick up the results from the facility once they were finished.
One of the people from the NDTBC was chosen to record the message for the Verboice call in Hindi:
We had the chance to take the weekend off to visit Delhi. Lodi Gardens, Akshardham, the Red Fort and Jama Masjid were some of the places we could enjoy.
We started the following week going to the Safdarjung Hospital to connect another diagnostic device on that hospital and then went back to FIND's offices to nail down the last details for the next day's workshop. During Tuesday and Wednesday we met with a great group of local doctors and technicians, with whom we've discussed their current methodologies and issues while diagnosing TB cases. We learned how Nikshay - the national TB monitoring system - works, and we discussed how to best integrate CDx with the existing workflow and tools.
Lastly, we deployed a third CDx Client to report TB test results from the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital, enabling us to receive more than 800 test results during this time.
The trip was a great opportunity to understand the needs and priorities people has in a place as distant as India, and to challenge some of the facts we took for granted while designing CDx. Talking directly with the potential users of the platform and seeing them at work has really enabled us to better understand what CDx needs to be for helping them better.
It was a great opportunity to go on holidays, too, and know great places and meet amazing people that India has to offer, but that would be a subject for a different post :)
