Jaroka Health Map System provides Disease Outbreak through Geographical Representation in Rural Areas

Jaroka health map module enables our system to look up and study the patients in rural areas of Mardan. We have incorporated Google map’s detailed and highly visual information representation into our application to characterize the patients in a better way for analysis. This helps the doctors to explore the patients based on their disease categories along with the refinement option based on patient’s gender.

It is a great achievement for our team as it is first of its kind in Pakistan regarding health.

The live access in only available to the team members of our project and not made public yet. This module is integrated with our Jaroka Tele-Healthcare system. Basically we have used the Google Map APi to embed the Google maps to our own application. Then we retrieve the patient data from Jaroka Tele-Healthcare system database and map the patients visually according to the disease category selected and corresponding to the GPS coordinates of the address location of the patient.

Initially when the page is loaded, it displays the villages located in rural Mardan District, Pakistan and shows the number of patients in each village (refer to the figure below).

Then the user can select the disease category from the drop down list present on the left side and view the patients falling into the category of that particular disease, let’s say we want to see the patients with the disease LRTI/URTI (refer to the following figure).

As here we want to view all the patients falling into this disease category, therefore both male and female patients are mapped along with the children. The differentiation between the patients is presented by using different colors. The map legend is present at the left bottom for reference. Following figure displays all the patients with the disease LRTI/URTI.

Note that we also show a small info box with each patient to show the village, gender and age of the patient. This information presented visually becomes much easier to analyze for the doctors and experts to see the outbreak of diseases in rural area of Pakistan.

Now if you want to see only the female patients falling under the disease category of LRTI/URTI, then following will be the output:

We have also mapped our Hospital onto the map so that the doctors can see the distance of patients’ location from our facility.

Jaroka Electronic Health Record System provides opportunities for further Research and Analysis

Mardan Facility has been operational from September, 2008 based on the experience of one and a half year and a number of events & activities arranged before and after its opening the project has proved itself creatively successful and well received in the area.

Our hospital UMTrust is located in Zahidabad at the border of Buner District and therefore, we have seen a huge influx of refugees in our area in Summer 2009. There are more than 50,000 patients we have treated in year 2009. Out of which there were around 15,000 IDPs we have treated in rural Mardan in the days of regular operations.

A sample of 30,000 patients out of a total 50,000 reflects that 50.97 % are females, 29.01% are children and 20.02% are males.

It is amazing to see such enormous ratio of female patients in the underserved rural area of Mardan. Among these patients majority were women and children, which emphasizes the main objective of the Jaroka Telehealth Project i.e. to reduce maternal and child mortality cases.

Our calculation is dependent on run-time data gathered. The electronically saved records allows our doctors to see much more of a person’s medical history than do paper files. It also enhances practice efficiency. The real data that is being gathered with the help of OpenEMR provides research opportunities for us as well as stakeholders involved in our project.For example: With the help of data analysis we came to know the most common diseases in the area, statistics of patients for each month, requirement of medicines , preventive measures for diseases etc.

Currently our records collected by OpenEMR software showed that mostly people in Mardan are suffering from URTI/LRTI diseases. And patients suffered from this disease category were total in number of 5879. For your understanding you can view Patient Distribution Graphs below with respect to different disease categorize.

Patient Registration Graph -2009

Patient Distribution Graph w.r.t Diseases.