Challenges in Global Health

Global health has provided us with some of the most exciting projects and work opportunities that we have experienced as technologists. The project objectives for improving healthcare, such reducing the prevalence of infectious diseases, and lowering under-5 mortality rates, are well-defined and quantitative. Technology has a critical role to play in this fight as the enabler of scalable data collection, real-time analytics, and scaling of life-saving innovations.

QED is working on several global projects in East Africa, collaborating with on-the-ground and international partners such as KEMRI, JOORTH, LSTM, ICAP, CDC, and BMGF. Some adversaries we face together include malaria, contracted through the world’s most deadly animal; HIV, the worst epidemic of our lifetimes (39M dead); stunting, the hidden tragedy affecting 25% of children; and under-5 child mortality, a critical measure for the development of humankind.

Many of our projects have started in Kisumu, a beautiful part of the world which we are very grateful for having brought us into the Global Health field.

Engineering Solutions

QED has been constructing software to equip metropolitan, rural, and mobile health clinics with the wherewithal to electronically collect clean data. Limitations in infrastructure present many technical challenges that require creativity and innovation to overcome. Examples include:

• robustness to constant adjustment of medical workflows,
• handling of adversarial internet conditions,
• longitudinal case management,
• building tidy data from fragmented databases, and
• finding practical compromises between paper and digital systems.

We sincerely wish for QED to serve a vehicle for calibrating new generations of engineering professionals, sensitizing them to problems of universal importance through hands-on experience.