Last Updated: 01/09/2025
Virtual Community of Healthcare Facilities: Optimization of Malaria Treatment
Objectives
The potential of eHealth to improve healthcare management is enormous. eHealth revolution and promises could help to wipe out healthcare problems facing developing countries. eHealth is one of response to the cornerstones of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) initiative.
In attempting to contribute to these massive challenges facing Africa’s healthcare systems, we develop the project called “Virtual Community of Healthcare Facilities (VCHF)”.
The Virtual Community of Healthcare Facilities System developed is medical software based on artificial intelligence as a solution addressed to the management of the complicated malaria specifically.
The system implemented as in the current release integrates the five components that offer services related to malaria.
- Optimization of Malaria Treatment (OMaT) component. The OMaT component is a web-based medical decision support system specifically for malaria diagnosis and therapy to assist Healthcare professionals at medical consultation in order to optimize the quality of care of patients with malaria disease.
- Virtual Lab Component. The Virtual Lab component provides an automatic diagnosis of malaria in a virtual slide. It is a remote diagnostics system and a real time web-based tool that can allow non experts to rapidly and easily collaborate with experts.
- Expert component: The Expert component is strategic and useful for experimentation. It plays an important role in the implementation of the medical decision support system of the two keys components (OMAT and VLab) and aims to ensure its accuracy over time.
- MalOnto component: The MalOnto component is a malaria ontology that is design to provide semantic to the medical decision system.
- eLearning component: The eLearning component aims to provide malaria educational videos and articles with quizzes.
The healthcare problems facing developing countries are great. In particular, malaria is one of infectious diseases that have affected human resources and impacted economy. Mostly, the management of the complicated malaria disease has priority.
The technical capability to perform a correct diagnosis of malaria infection is of the out most importance in several settings for clinical, epidemiological and research purposes.
All cases of suspected malaria should have a parasitological test to confirm the diagnosis. Laboratory diagnosis of malaria can be made through microscopic examination of thick and thin blood smears. After malaria parasites are detected on a blood smear, the parasite density should then be estimated.
Once the diagnosis of malaria has been made, appropriate antimalarial treatment must be initiated immediately. Treatment should be guided by three main factors:
- The infecting Plasmodium species,
- The clinical status of the patient,
- The drug susceptibility of the infecting parasites as determined by the geographic area where the infection was acquired and the previous use of antimalarial medicines.
It is stated that malaria case management, consisting of early diagnosis and prompt effective treatment, remains a vital component of malaria control and elimination strategies.
Capacity Strengthening
Health Systems
Impact of Interventions
Information Systems
Operational Research
Mar 2019 — Mar 2020
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