Saving Lives

I believe it was in 2004 that I read a sad story about a young man who died from an accident. You may think that people dying from accidents are not really a story and it happens every day. But what bothered me about this story was the fact that this young man died because the blood to save his life arrived 36 hours late and when it arrived it arrived it came from a town that was only 60 km away from the place of accident.

This story bothered our group so much that we wanted to solve this problem with we were good at, that was systems design and software development. The question in front of us was very simple
“How can we get blood to the place of need, as soon as possible, especially in a third worldcountry?”

As we designed the solution there were three obvious facts that stood out
1. In case of major catastrophe we need to mobilize masses
2. Use of Mobile Devices and SMS messaging is the best way to mobilize people in developing countries
3. There should be a single master repository of donors and their availability information that can be maintained by multiple individual groups.

As an offshoot we also wanted to enable all blood banks to talk to each other using service oriented architecture ( SOA)
The solution was simple.
• Identify people living within certain radius of a geographical location that meet the criteria of the need
o Use address
o Google maps
o Donor repository
o Cell / location ( using mobile apps)
• Send an outbound SMS explaining the need, place and asking for confirmation
• Receive inbound messages and process confirmation
o Keep a buffer of need + x%
• Send re-confirmation with details of place and time
o Receive inbound SMS confirmation of acceptance
• If you do not get enough response then expand the radius up to a certain limit.

We have technology for the SMS processing, creating an easy to maintain repository and searching for people in a geographic radius. What we did not have was a SME & a potential user who would be interested in a solution like this.

The design of blood bank communication was stopped at a high level since we did not have enough information on the SW being used for tracking blood storage details in hospitals. However were very confident that we could make it a reality using Service Oriented Architecture.

As a payback to the country that gave us free education without which many of us would not have seen a college, we were prepared to devote certain amt of our own personal funds to this cause.

What I need is a subject matter expert in this area and a potential organization that would be interested in a solution like this. Contact us at solutions@quadrobay.com, if you know of some organization that could save lives using our technology and approach