May
11
Blog #15: Questions and Pitch
- Identify the 10 toughest questions from the 14-page list, and answer them in advance of your presentations.
- How prevalent/significant is this issue? Can you provide specific and relevant statistics?
- This issue is very prevalent, we can see that the HC distribution is not even in urban or rural areas whatsoever. There is a 2:10,000 provider-to-population ratio, only 185 doctors in the entire country with 8.5 million people living in Sierra Leone.
- Is this issue relevant outside of the specific geography you are working in?
- Yes, because even in rural areas of the US for example, there is an inadequate amount of healthcare workers in relation to the population. A lot of HC workers want to work in urban areas, leaving the rural areas empty.
- How do these numbers compare against the US?
- In the US it is 295 physicians per 100,000 population.
- What SPECIFIC issue are you trying to tackle?
- Education in HCW in SL, also the overall efficiency of a PHU in SL. Doesn’t have to be specific to SL, can also be broadly as a healthcare work environment.
- How exactly are you tackling this issue? Can you show me how it works step by step?
- We are developing Alexa skills in the developer console and going to demo it in the country. We are developing use cases, some examples of which include a question-and-answer format or a flowchart conversion. Here is a demo of one of the skills.
- If I am a <primary stakeholder>, how will I experience your solution?
- You will use Alexa in a healthcare setting, asking her to possibly schedule patients’ appointments, send reminders to patients, log patients’ info, and ask something about insurance – all depending on what role you have in the healthcare force.
- What is your core innovation? What sets you apart? What is fundamentally novel about your approach/solution?
- Nobody else is really doing anything like this, especially in an LMIC. There is some research surrounding Alexa in high-income countries, but not in low-middle-income countries. This is still a new and emerging field so we are still setting the stage for what’s to come.
- Who are your primary stakeholders?
- HCW, patients, SL government, non-profits, local hospitals
- Is there a novelty factor with your product/service? What will make the customers keep coming back?
- The efficiency of Alexa itself is something we hope that will make customers keep coming back to our product.
- How accessible is your product?
- This is something we are working on with connectivity in the country. We discovered mifi devices that we will test during Mountaintop and plan to use in the country as well.
- How prevalent/significant is this issue? Can you provide specific and relevant statistics?
- Write 3 elevator speeches about your project:
- For a professor/advisor
- We’re using Amazon’s Alexa for healthcare in Sierra Leone. The current PHUs in SL are inefficient with flowcharts scattered around the rooms. Alexa will help with this and store all of this information so that it can help the HCW in the PHU.
- For an interviewer for a summer internship
- It’s a group research project that focuses on using Amazon’s Alexa in a healthcare setting in Sierra Leone. We are researching different use cases that would be helpful for an HCW in SL, and later we are going to demo this during fieldwork.
- For a roommate asking about your project
- Think of it like using Alexa but for healthcare, so in an office, you would be able to say, “Hey set up patients x’s follow-up appointment”. Or a patient could also use it and help them with reminders for medicine and things like that. The only difference is we are trying to implement this in Sierra Leone for the healthcare workers there since a lot of how the peripheral health units are run is inefficient and can be made easier with the help of Alexa.
- For a professor/advisor