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Nairobi has fewer cases of malaria
than many other parts of Kenya.
But Kibera, its largest slum, is home to many newcomers and travelers who may acquire malaria somewhere else.
Based on the excellent needs-finding reports conducted by our partners at the University of Nairobi
we set out to create a mobile application that would help Elizabeth and others like her find the medication they so desperately need.
Our initial concept was quite simple: a mobile phone should connect people to medication.
As we began to prototype this idea,
we realized that the system would be a bit more complex.
Our user would need to access a database,
receive information about where to find medication,
and then feed this information back into the database to help the next user.
So we began prototyping each link in this chain.
First, we explored the idea of which medication should be our focus.
Based on feedback we received from experts,
we decided that ACT, the best treatment for Malaria, should be our initial focus.
Next, we prototyped our user interface.
What they said surprised us; price was a much more important consideration for them than we had anticipated.
Our next iteration
reflected this need.
Now, our working prototype of the user interface goes something like this:
A major challenge was figuring out how to get the information about drug availability into a database.
We prototyped several possible solutions for this.
We thought about crowd sourcing information about stockouts, but it wasn't clear that enough users would be incentivized to spend money to report the problem.
We considered having pharmacists report their stock, but the needs-finding reports we received from the University of Nairobi showed us that pharmacists might be too over-extended and under-resourced to be asked to do this work.
We explored housing our database at a clinic, but we learned that Tabitha clinic might be the only one with enough resources to do this job, and they already have a well stocked pharmacy in house.
We thought about working directly with a drug manufacturer, and had some initial conversations with the maker of the most successful ACT drug, but we haven't yet established a formal partnership.
Our most promising idea is a partnership with an existing counterfeit protection system.
Since patients already have an incentive to text in, what if they also texted in the location and price information for the drug?
This would solve our incentive problem, and allow us to collect information about location and price that could feed back into our database.
We have spoken with a leader at a social enterprise company doing counterfeit protection work, and we hope to deepen a partnership as our project progresses.
When a patient receives a new drug, she scratches to expose a code. She texts the code and receives an "ok" or "no" to tell whether the drug is real.
Soon, we should be able to use mobile phones to connect people like Elizabeth to the medication they need.