~FurSid

I have been called by some fine gentlemen as soon as the news of patient management system got spread. I was working as a volunteer to move patients in and out of these hospitals when I quickly had few meetings with surgeons and doctors at PIMS, RGH and DHQ… haven’t tried CMH because of few reasons though. But I have gathered initial assessment of HR, data requirements and few specs which I would have loved to share with you guys right away but since there are so many other things going on and I am just trying to give my best not to let these IT initiatives be a shame of Management, Team Work and Optimized level of motivation…. I personally believe to request and work with Islamabad based developers, analysts and QA gentlemen and in this regard, I would greatly depend and count on the efforts of Taha Masood (Ex-Nustian), Asif Malik (Ex-Fastian, IBM) and Asma Mirza (IIU) and Iftikhar Ajmal who’s been very helpful before my arrival here at ISB. I have yet to see both of strong contenders for Patient Management System and Missing People Database - Tsunami-tested Sohana http://sahana.sourceforge.net/ and THK’s own systems.

I am sending this email to the brilliant Angelo who’s been more helpful to many people like me through http://quakehelp.blogspot.com than other media. I believe Email is a notorious and human energy-intensive application not suited for communication beyond more than two persons. So, a sister-blog or whatever should be setup and managed by the same team of Quakehelp. If I was in Karachi or had more time, I would have taken this responsibility but if there’s anyone I can count on in these times, its quakehelp team who’ve collaborated, coordinated and managed digital information very effectively in disasters like Tsunami and Katrina. Angelo, please look into this matter urgently and post your message at your blog and/or setup co-authors accordingly. In this way, people needn’t call at my mobile all the time and I repeating the same things over and over and PASHA not sending emails to individuals and the same emails then re-routed to still more individuals. I had great hopes from the use of blogs in this disaster and despite the indifference and ignorance of traditional media about the brave bloggers who’ve not been quick to respond, I think we can really pull this together. PASHA’s president, Jehan Ara, PSEB, IBM and Intel representatives can be added as co-authors of the blog right away and Angel can setup an email account through which these writers can just post through their email applications. It may sound little Extra and daunting but believe me, email sucks big time and we are no NGOs or Government officials to rely on this highly inefficient way of communication.

I am insisting and coordinating with few web-savvy doctors to start writing their medi-blogs, diaries right from the hospitals where instead of existing capacity of 700, they are forced to manage 3000 and increasing no. of patients. These doctors can easily manage their blogs and daily diaries of incidents only they can tell. Ideally, I would have wishes podcasts. But in a country where the first collective serious blogging started no sooner than 14th Aug 2005 and now in this disaster, I think that might be little too cutting-edge for us. Though that’d be ideal in our case. I strongly urge islamabadians to visit these hospitals and meet the docs and improve their IT infrastructure as much as you guys can. Aside from few field hospitals which I visited only yesterday, thanks to army and UN teams, the local Pindi hospitals have doctors who can give you some time. Ultimately these doctors and NGOs would be reporting round the clock not the News Agencies (dont ask me why but that’s how public media should and would work in the new economy, I strongly believe and advocate).

I still haven’t got any update from Mr. Azhar Rizvi of THK Solutions who had already built a seemingly similar application of patient management system but anyone interested to talk to IBM’s representative Asif Malik and/or Srilankan developers bearing responsibilities of Sahana, please contact him at amalik@pk.ibm.com email him, then email me and then email everyone whatever you emailed and this would have wasted at least few hours (considering bandwidth problems) right away. So please we need a community blog where these coordination has to be managed and reported to the public and fellow IT people. Angelo, despite his location in Europe can still manage it, I am sure as Zohare and others have already been reporting rare news items from the Azad Kashmir at quakehelp.blogspot.com

I would also suggest the IT teams moving into the badly affected areas beyond Muzaffarabad to arrange GPRS devices and other gadgets which can report the places to Google Earth, which can then be put up online through Angelo, again. Only maps we have so far are from MapAction, I believe. Anyways, Act as you may please but act together.

Regards
Ejaz Asi
from Pindi/Islamabad