Ensuring Patient Safety in Remote Areas with SnooCODE RED
Fig. 1 Medication Safety: Medication Without Harm; Source: Imperial College London
“Medicines are powerful tools for protecting health. But medicines that are wrongly prescribed, taken incorrectly or are of poor quality can cause serious harm and even death” – Director-General of WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus.
In 2016, I had a medical emergency that was marked by significant blood loss. I was almost lifeless, and while I could see, I could do nothing else – not even move a finger. The cause of this emergency will shock you. Earlier that week, I had visited a health facility to report some anomalies that I had noticed on my body. The health professional that I spoke to prescribed some pills that he promised would correct the issue. The pills didn’t correct the issue; rather, they caused me to bleed so profusely that my roommate at the time joked that I would be useless to a ritualist because they would find no blood in my body. Thankfully, my doctors managed to stabilise my situation with two blood transfusions (eternally grateful to them!).
Clearly, the medication that I was given for the anomalies that I reported wasn’t safe, and it nearly cost me my life.
Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, says that dangerous medication practices are prevalent throughout Africa, and according to the WHO, one in 20 patients experiences avoidable drug harm and unsafe medication practices.
When drugs are improperly prescribed, delivered, administered, or monitored insufficiently, they can be harmful to patients.
Research has shown that human factors and inadequate pharmaceutical systems are the main causes of unsafe medical practices, with many countries lacking the capacity to detect, evaluate and prevent medicine safety issues.
SnooCODE RED’s Contribution to Medication Safety
SnooCODE RED is a smart digital health ecosystem that allows medical distributors to efficiently deliver authentic drugs and other supplies to remote areas by road or by drone, and verify each delivery, significantly reducing the consumption of counterfeit drugs in Africa.
SnooCODE RED's capabilities extend beyond the efficient delivery of genuine medications. The system also enables the Public, and other health workers to accurately locate and navigate to a patient, health facility, pharmacy, or emergency scene and determine, notify, and confirm the closest, available, most appropriate health assets (ambulance stations, hospitals, pharmacies, doctors) to an emergency. It also enables location data collection for epidemiological purposes.
Described by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) of the World Bank as "a sister technology to Blockchain," our Verification System ensures that there is accountability throughout the healthcare logistics value chain. Using our digital signature system (verification system), pharmaceutical companies can check the delivery of drugs to the appropriate locations by directing their respective delivery services to take and share appropriately tagged photos of the drugs that they deliver, ensuring the delivery of only authentic drugs.
In the wake of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organisation’s African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation (ANDI) identified the SnooCODE digital addressing system as “a key technology in providing timely emergency care across Africa, especially in the fight against infectious and vector-borne diseases like malaria, cholera, and Ebola”, as it showed the potential to help healthcare professionals to easily identify disease-prone areas.
More recently, SnooCODE RED has been highlighted on the WHO Africa website with a description of SnooCODE RED's features and advantages.
As we at TinyDAVID, the makers of SnooCODE RED, fight to create an Africa devoid of fake medications, we will continue to work towards delivering Emergency and Public Health access to at least 430 million people across Africa.
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