Open Source Telemedicine

...Sana is a highly multidisciplinary volunteer-driven organization hosted at MIT comprised of students and working professionals in the fields of medicine, public health, engineering, and business. We have developed and implemented a free, open source, cell phone based telemedicine system that empowers frontline community health workers and general practitioners to provide expert care to patients with the support of remote specialists and doctors. Sana is a smartphone application written for the Android operating system that allows health workers to collect medical data (photo, video, audio, free text, and rich data such as x-ray, ultrasound, and ECG), and send this data using the cellular network to an electronic medical record system. A doctor in an urban hospital who participates in the Sana referral network logs into the online medical record system using his or her browser, reviews the case, and enters the diagnosis and treatment recommendation, which are then sent back to the health worker's cell phone so that the care can be delivered.