Sana Mobile: Connecting Big-City Care to Patients in Remote Villages

Decision-making support for nurses and health workers, even when connectivity is poor or low, is possible with Sana Mobile, an Android-based mobile health application. Formerly known as Moca Mobile, the Sana technology facilitates remote consultations between health care specialists and community health workers in remote areas.

Sana Mobile started at MIT's NextLab, where developers, faculty and students collaborate to tackle a problem using mobile technology. The Sana technology was developed by Sidhant Jena, Sana team lead and Harvard Business School student and Russell Ryan, lead engineer and MIT student.

When general practitioners lack the expertise to diagnose a case, they refer patients to specialists, who may not be easily accessible. The Sana technology addresses the lack of accessibility to specialty care in places, where specialist doctors and tertiary care centers are sparse....

...Using Sana, physicians can create medical procedures and upload them to phones used by health workers and nurses. Procedures are step-by-step instructions that guide the community health worker through all the data points that need to be collected and questions that need to be asked during an appointment with a patient.  Health workers can run these pre-programmed medical procedures on their phones and collect the required patient data, including pictures and video as they are prompted.

The information collected can be uploaded to a web-based medical health record system for a doctor to review. The diagnosis or recommendation for follow-up is sent back to the community health worker, who then communicates this information back to the patient.