The Free Clinic project started as a group of students participating in the Jacob's School of Engineering's Teams In Engineering Service (TIES) program, working out of in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California San Diego.
The group began its work in 2006, and was tasked with producing an electronic medical records system for the UCSD School of medicine's free clinics. These clinics operate out of several community-donated locations around the county of San Diego. The Doctors need a networked method for electronically storing patient information.
More than 30 years ago a futuristic vision of medical treatment was presented in the Sci-Fi show Star Trek We saw Dr. McCoy use a powerful hand held "Tricorder" device to help him treat his patients. Now that we have entered the new era mobile convergence, the time has come for medical workers to utilize mobile handsets to provide better care to their patients.
On November 5th the Open Handset Alliance was announced. This is a partnership between Google and a wide array of handset manufacturers, network providers, and software companies. They have designed a platform called "Android", which will become the foundation for a new generation of mobile computing. Google is putting up ten million dollars which will be awarded to the fifty teams of developers who produce the most promising Android applications.
Until the announcement of Android, the Free Clinic Project has been exclusively a web-based application. But we have seen the winds of change and are adapting to them. We have launched our new site FreeClinicProject. org, and mobilized UCSD to produce an entry the Google competition by March 3rd 2008. We are going to utilize the work we have done already, and port our application to work on the handsets which will become available in Q2-2008.
The plan is to build the Free Clinic Project as an Open Source application, backed by an active community of developers. The software will be used for humanitarian missions such as treating AIDS in Africa, where mobile phone signal are sometimes the only infrastructure. Our project will compliment Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra, and will be sure to attract attention from the global media. We intend to establish relationships with hardware manufacturers and network providers to donate prototype handsets, and financial support. The positive attention the project receives in the media will make a powerful public relations story for the corporations who choose to have their contributions showcased.
We ultimately intend to produce a commercial software product. We will do this by using the BSD license, which will allow us to release an expanded closed-source commercial version of the system in addition to the open source project. We will sell an enhanced version of the free clinic project which is tailored to suit the needs of for-profit medical practices. Our company will provide deployment, training and support to its customers.
Nearly 100,000 people a year die because of preventable medical errors in the United States. Many errors are as simple as the right treatment being given to the wrong person. We will incorporate a RFID reader which will allow hospitals to give their patients bracelets which will be able to ensure the right treatments are getting to the right patients. This alone could save thousands of lives. This is just one example of countless add-ons which could be incorporated with our system.