Randy Roberson - H.E.L.P.

Dear Dr. Winston Mendes Davidson,

I am very interested in your patient database efforts. At the core of my focus is a desire to always offer "a hand up rather than a hand out." In doing so, it is always important for me to try to incorporate any existing local technologies or team efforts into our efforts. As such i would be very open to your involvement and would love to see what you have been working on. If sharing information and/or links to your work here is not appropriate, please feel free to contact me directly at rroberson@disasterlogistics.org. Thank you again for your interest in working together to help the people of Kenya. I hope you will read my message to below to Dr. Gupta.

Dear Raj Gupta Ph.D.

Thank you very much for contacting me regarding our upcoming needs assessment activities in Kenya. I will also post the information from this email on the MedTechIQ site as there may be more people there who will benefit from this additional information.

With the 12 years experience in Kenya, you no doubt have a great deal of situational awareness and confirmed ground truth. I am VERY interested in developing an ongoing dialog with you and invite collaborations with our efforts there. Perhaps working together we can find win/win benefits for our respective concerns.

First, please allow me to provide you with a little additional information regarding our efforts in Kenya. HELP has been quietly supporting a water purification project near Lake Victoria for the past 3 years. HELP’s primary areas of focus are water purification and mobile medical clinics, incorporating the use of live two-way telemedicine communications from even the most remote locations. This is done using satellite, cellular and/or MESH communications.

I have established relationships with several rural clinics and orphanages and have interest in connecting them to a metro hospital in Nairobi. This will all be done with a combination of tools including HELP’s cargo container clinics and solar powered telemedicine backpacks as well as providing various telemed equipment into existing rural clinics and the metro locations.

As I am sure you know, there are huge populations with little if any access to modern healthcare. The network we will establish will provide multiple benefits for these populations. First and foremost, the diagnostic and specialist consult capabilities will enable even rudimentarily trained medical field personnel to provide significantly increased capabilities. Likewise built in databases for monitoring disease migration and mitigation will allow key decision makers to see in real-time what is happening in various locations across Kenya. The same is also true for the disaster management/situational awareness data systems we also provide. While the system addresses basic health concerns on an ongoing basis, the infrastructure established will also be a profoundly effective life-saving tool in times of natural disaster or conflict.

While our container clinics can be configured for various specialty applications (e.g. trauma, cardiac, OB, infectious disease, etc.) our primary focus will probably be to offer basic clinics at the start. There is no doubt a great amount of topics which can be discussed here, and please know I am willing to do so if you are interested.

Certainly one of the next questions must be, “Who is going to pay for all this?” Long story greatly abbreviated, I am working with several groups who have interests in funding pieces and parts of this project. We will however need additional partners to bring this all together. But we don’t just have our hand out. In fact, this is where some of what HELP can establish can also help our partners.

We have seen that the telemedicine links we establish are also fantastic support building (and maintaining) tools. As we (and our partners) work with various foundations and other funders, we are capable of providing them with live real-time looks at what is going on in these clinics. They can ask questions of the staff and see them working with patients. This not only provides increased transparency and accountability, but it also engages the hearts of those who might otherwise not consider ever traveling to these remote 3rd world locations. It also provides a great real-time tool for researchers and others who are pursuing field testing (etc.) with live ongoing communications with their respective projects.

As a non-profit we have held quite a bit of the technology we use rather close to the vest. This was not done because of proprietary concerns, but rather to keep our equipment/system costs under control. As you know, too many cooks in the kitchen can make the soup rather expensive. It is also good to note that we did not come into this looking for ways to deploy this technology. After 12 years in most of the major disasters in our world, we majored in mobile medicine and water purification out of a profound need demonstrated in every disaster I’ve been to. Likewise, the telemedicine components were added during the 2004 tsunami simply because I needed to have a doctor looking over my shoulder. I worked on the western shores of Thailand (Phuket & Kao Lak) then went to the eastern shores of India. I would place a digital stethoscope on patients in tsunami relief camps (9 hours from the nearest airport) and Dr. Alan Michels back here in Arizona would be listening to digital heart and lung sounds and, among many disorders presented, diagnosed TB from 10,000 miles away. In much the same way, I strongly believe telemedicine technology can greatly assist in addressing the critical health needs in many locations throughout Kenya.

I covet the knowledge your group has obtained over the past 12 years working in Kenya. I invite collaborations for the greater good of the fine people of Kenya. And I hope to provide not only a tool for increased healthcare, but also a proactive tool for heading off the disease AND disaster challenges of the future. Any insight or involvement you can offer would be warmly welcomed.

For the greater good,

Randy S. Roberson

906 N. Colcord Road
Payson, AZ 85541 USA
P 1-928-595-1127
F 1-928-492-1027
rroberson@disasterlogistics.org
www.disasterlogistics.org