A Bit About the Program

Several years ago my Dad who is one of the founding members of Road2IR which is a teaching outreach program for Interventional Radiology (IR) in several countries around Africa. After a couple years of trying to figure out what a tool that would help the program out that was also one that was realistic for one person to build, maintain, and support, we finally found a good sized project. Inventory and Case management.

The program is working to introduce IR in a number of different hospitals in different countries with teaching teams coming from around the world bringing supplied, ideas, and different standard ways of doing things with them. Normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, and having medical students here in Canada go to different hospitals to learn works really well. But this becomes way more challenging when the teaching teams that are coming from first-world countries with all the supports and tools that they have at their hospitals bringing their suggestions on how to set up a new department to third-world hospitals where most of those tools do not exist. For example here in Canada all of our hospitals have some form of central IT support that manages computers and WIFI networks, computer systems for managing patient information and records, imaging and test results, as well as inventory and product obtainment processes. However, one of the sites in Uganda that I had the privilege of being able to be at for 2 weeks in April 2024 did not have most of that.

  • The team of 4 doctors had a single computer to work from.
  • Their inventory consisted of donated medical products that the visiting teams were able to get and bring with them.
  • There was not WIFI in their portion of the hospital.
  • Imaging, test results, and medical records needed to be brought in by the patients
  • Support staff like nurses and technicians are shared with several other departments without set schedules
  • Medical devices are not supplied by the hospital, but the patient needs to go to a pharmacy get the device then come back for the procedure.
  • Case tracking is done on a piece of paper or an Excel sheet on their computer.

All of these things are unimaginable to happen at a hospital here, but are ‘normal’ at their hospitals.

Where I come in

While I was there to help and see how things worked, we found that one of the struggles that the team had was with figuring out what items they had in their inventory that they could use when planning and prepping cases. This became extra clear as an issue when we were putting the new devices we brought with us and we noticed that they had tons of some items already that we brought more of and none of some that were needed that the team thought they had. I decided this relatively small area could probably be improved if there was a tool in place to keep track of the inventory, and even better if upcoming volunteer teams could look at the inventory list to see what types of devices they should try to get to bring with. So thats what I decided to try to work on.

In the rest of the 2 weeks that we were there I build a super simple inventory and case tracking web application that can be used to keep track of all the information they needed. One of the particular challenges for this type of environment that makes very difficult to use any of the pre-existing tools is the huge potential number of vendors that they can have for different products. Normally a hospital will have one vendor for each item that they have which makes it really easy to use barcode scanning to scan items to add and remove them from the inventory and to be able to look up the exact product name and find out how many there are and all the information about them. However, in these sites where the products are being brought by teams that are coming from different hospitals from different parts of the world each with different relationships with supplies any item can come from anywhere. So a custom solution was needed for this particular case.

Inventory App

Interest

If you have stumbled across this and you think that this inventory app or something like this would work for your site feel free to contact me and we can talk about getting it implemented for you.