Focus on Senegal

Prof. Mbayang Ndiaye Niang is setting up a project in Senegal as part of the Health Ministry Telemedicine Office objectives, one of the projects HTech4Dev decided to support. Their goal is to implement an e-health system in Senegal which should allow a broade and better access to health. One aspect of this ambitious project is the setting up of an electronic medical records system for patients and doctors in order to cope with the accessibility issues and the frequent people displacements in the country. It is also important to link telemedicine (teleconsulation, teleradiology etc…) to the medical records. This appears to be a realistic solution to allow a virtual bridge between the remote districts and the hospital in big cities. As far as technology is concerned, different solution already have been considered: the specifications need to be clarified regarding the users’ needs and compliance as well as the data management.

A steering committee has been formed to build up the project and address some the main issues of the project:

• Laurent Braak, MEDES, Toulouse, France
• Philippe Gesnouin, INRIA, Aviesan
• Laurence Esterle, CNRS, Aviesan
• Guillaume Delapierre, LETI, CEA
• Alexandra Monteiro, Brazil, who recently joined the team to strengthen the telemedicine aspects of the project.

There is actually a lot of work to do to organize the different tasks, plan the different steps and bring together the various stakeholders. For now, Orange-Sonatel and AMREF are the most helpful supports to start this project. The steering committee is thus working on the different work packages of the project to prioritize them and build them as separate subprojects to be funded on their own:

• Patient ID
• Epidemiological surveillance
• Patient electronic records
• Telemedicine
• Training

We have also considered creating an official structure to lead this project to address the various pivotal issues raised by this project (ethics, data management, technological challenges…).

WAHA is driving a similar pilot study on this area in Western Africa, their experience and conclusion may be complementary to our project.

Aviesan partners meeting

We met with the Aviesan partners involved in this initiative to evaluate the progress made on the projects. We actually sent them (Gambia, Cameroon, Senegal, Gabon-Fougamou) recommendation to improve their initial project, make it more focused on technology transfer and attractive for funding.

Representatives from the Pasteur Institute, IRD and INRIA noted that the technological aspects have not been yet considered as the PIs are still in the first phase of setting up their project in a population with specific needs to analyze.

We also discussed about a potential frame for our initiative. In France, several CVTs (Thematic Valorization Consortia) are being sat up to enhance technology transfer in strategic fields. The “CVT Aviesan” will focus on health technologies, the “CVT for South” will focus on technology transfer to the South. If one of our projects fits in one of the CVTs strategy, it could then be supported by a team dedicated to technology transfer and IP issues.