Vitex Pandemic Assistant Tool.

Middle- and low-income countries continue to grapple with high morbidity and mortality rates contributed to by high rate of Hospital Aquired Infections and infectious diseases like Ebola, Covid-19. Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) contribute significantly to the disease burden in these countries. A prevalence study by World Health Organization (WHO) found 8.7% of nosocomial infections in hospitalized patients, in low -income countries prevalence varies between 5.7% and 19.1%. A US study found 3.2% (Magil et al 2018) while one in Europe found 8.9 million cases annually (Suetens et al 2018).
There is a need for systems that would help address health challenges associated with hospital infection and emerging infectious diseases. The current practice of using  chemicals is relatively expensive, potentially toxic and some  pathogens have developed resistance rendering them ineffective. WHO data reveals doctor per 1,000 persons as;  Uganda – 0.12 . Physician burnout is certain with a detrimental impact on patient and physician safety and healthcare performance.

(Vitex) will effectively disinfect bacteria, viruses and protozoa in the spaces where patients are housed. This will be especially useful in pediatric wards with a high prevalence of hospital acquired pneumonia where current practice of using  chemicals is relatively expensive, potentially toxic and unable to disinfect air where pathogens are easily transmitted  through aerosol. More so, some  pathogens have developed resistance rendering these chemicals ineffective. More so, People fail to correctly wash their hands 97% of the time. Even in a healthcare setting, healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the times they should. Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) continue to spread, leading to extended patient length of stays, death and steep financial penalties for healthcare facilities and patients.

Vitex is an integrated eco-friendly system which utilizes antimicrobial materials; Plactive an1(tm). These copper and nano copper filaments  continuously eliminate dangerous pathogens up to 99.9%  on the device surface. Additionally, affordable 3D-printed materials made from 80% waste plastic are used.

This device sterilizes wards up to 99.99% , by employing  far UVC engine that can be used in occupied rooms. Far UVC light of 222nm kills pathogens efficiently regardless of their drug-resistant proficiency, but without skin and eye damaging effects associated with conventional germicidal UV exposure, thus exposing no risk of cancer and cataracts, therefore, it can work in typical Ugandan hospitals, which are always occupied and congested unlike conventional systems that work in unoccupied rooms. Vitex further sterilizes medical supplies like masks, water, and oxygen sensors within the device. The major benefit of Vitex is the ability to safely and effectively sterilize surfaces, hands and air where most respiratory pathogens lurk.

Vitex’s adoption of conversational artificial intelligence is a marked advantage over other technology systems providing a more  patient-practitioner interaction.

Vitex is compatible to solar charging hence can work with the unavailability of electricity a marked improvement from existing systems.

Beneficiaries of our system include hospitals, hospices and other long-term care facilities and Patients especially mothers ,neonates ,and medical personnel at risk of infection posed by poor health care facilities, such in congested wards and operating rooms, non-adherence to safety and sanitation protocols and low availability of healthcare professionals. 

Our device provides at least 80% reduction in the rate of nosocomial infections in hospitals, the percentage of time to distribute supplies to patients should improve by 40% over the manual processes thereby enabling nurses concentrate on other critical issues. That is, the percentage of nurses needed to administer supplies should reduce by at least 40%.

Vitex will lead to; Reduction in spending on protective personal gear due to reduced contact, reduction in practitioner infections, reduced mortality due to infections and antimicrobial resistant strains, Improved patient records and most importantly reduction in costs for recurrent disinfection and hand sanitizer purchase.

Our anticipated community impact is a reduction of the morbidity and mortality rates these resultantly will increase  lifespan and survival.

Vitex's has an ability to safely and effectively sterilize surfaces ,and air where most respiratory pathogens lurk. liquid disinfection is ineffective in these situations. Vitex can also sterilize equipment using safe far UVC. The current practice of using  chemicals is relatively expensive, potentially toxic and some  pathogens have developed resistance  rendering them ineffective.  The tool will additionally collect   manage medical data. Nasal prongs and masks sometimes are not disinfected and this aids in the transfer of infections from one baby to another ,having our system in place, these can be sterilised inside the cabinets within the device before use from one patient to another without leaving residual scents and liquids.

Our team is composed of ambitious and resilient student innovators and mentors with skills in programming , general medicine, and Computer Aided Designs providing a rich resource to scale this project. The team has transformed our crude first prototype into a sleek modern design.

TEAM 

We have three co-founders as listed below

Mugisha Gift Arnold. - Team Leader/CEO (male)

He is the co-founder of Vitex Scientific limited, a
startup that manufactures hospital disinfecting systems,hospital softwares and automated medical assistants.

He is am undergraduate in Bio-engineering  with great leadership, project, and resource management skills. He is a visionary with the aptitude to lead a team toward specific milestones. He is a critical thinker and an agile leader.

Arnold Kiirya, - Chief Technical Officer (male) 

A student system Developer working on coding, and integration of the project. He is fully committed to the company and the development of our product with in-depth knowledge of coding and Computer Aided Designs.

Ainembabazi Samantha, - General Manager (female)

She is pursuing a bachelor's degree in Medicine and Surgery and she is a great multiplier to our team. She is an expert in financial management with solid presentation skills and the ability to explain complex medical terminologies to an audience. she will lead medical  research activities. 

ADVISORS

We have two advisors who are listed here below.

1. Prof Faith-Michael Uzoka,Prof of Comp Science @ Mount Royal University, Calgary,with extensive research experience in med DSS & tech adoption & innovation.

2.Dr.Peter Zeh, Assistant Prof in Healthcare &
Research Methodologies, Coventry University, with research focus on
multi-morbidity, telehealth, and implementation science. He is greatly skilled with diverse knowledge about medical systems operations and has been a backbone to our progress.

3.Dr. Lucy Amaniyo, Paediatrician and public health practitioner with a passion for reducing health disparities among vulnerable children.

As a doctor who serves the Rural community in Uganda, she
understands the pain points of the Rural population. Under her guidance,
we are able to clearly address the needs of the end customers.

Preliminary work carried out to date

We have built the Minimum Viable Product for this project and tested with four hospitals by disinfecting their highly infectious Covid-19 wards for the year 2021 where we dove down infections by 80%.

We built an App module for remote device control.

Strategy for testing/piloting your Innovation

We are working towards launching a Pilot in 10 more hospitals in both urban and  rural areas of Uganda,
Simultaneously we are working with the President – Community Rural Medical Practitioners welfare association on the process of on boarding more nurses and doctors for training. This we are conducting a series of workshops for health workers across different districts starting from 08 May 2022.

We are expecting to onboard nearly 200 health workers  spread across the
10 hospitals by the end of the 3-month period
starting from May 2022.

The outcomes of our research have been published in high impact
computing and medical information systems outlets such as: International
Conference on Medical and Health Informatics, International Conference
on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, Int.

Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, International Conference on e-Health, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Medical and Care Compunetics, Expert Systems with Applications and International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance.

We plan to disseminate the outcomes of this project in the following venues:

• Two post-project workshops for: i) institutional users, and ii) individual users (in Uganda)
• At least one journal publication. A target journal is:
• At least, one conference presentation. A target conference is:     

Journal of Medical Systems, which “provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the increasingly extensive applications of new information systems techniques and methods across all health care settings”. https://www.springer.com/journ...

IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics. ICHI is “the premier community forum concerned with the application of computer science principles, information science principles, information technology, and communication technology to address problems in healthcare, public health, and everyday wellness. The conference highlights the most novel technical contributions in computing-oriented health informatics and the related social and ethical implications” https://ichi2021.institute4hi....

As with any innovation scale-up, we anticipate some challenges, most of
which would relate to anticipation of partnership involvement and
funding. It is our expectation that Solve, ministry of health, government
hospitals and private healthcare companies such as pharmaceuticals and
private hospitals, will partner with us, providing about 10% of the
financial support, plus the legal framework for system implementation.
There is a possibility that we might encounter regulatory challenges. To
mitigate the risk, we will enter into prior discussions with the health
authorities and obtain all implementation approvals.  We intend to
strike collaborations with innovators, researchers and health
professionals in Uganda, as a strategy for navigating the contextual
peculiarities.

Vitex has the ability to safely and effectively sterilize surfaces, hands and air where most respiratory pathogens lurk. liquid disinfection is ineffective in these situations. Vitex can also sterilize equipment using UVC. The current practice of using chemicals is relatively expensive, potentially toxic and some pathogens have developed resistance rendering them ineffective.  The tool will additionally collect, manage medical data. Comparatively, similar yet less Integrated medical tools such as Thor and Zora bot devices only sterilize and offer monitoring respectively. Nasal cannula and masks can not be disinfected effectively using chemicals and this aids in the transfer of infections from one baby to another, having our system in place, these can be sterilized inside the cabinets within the device before use from one baby or mother to another. Vitex’s adoption of conversational artificial intelligence is a marked advantage. The brainwave unit (provides a revolutionary brain computer interface for device control and patient monitoring), thus, making our device far more advanced

Unlike existing systems, Vitex is compatible to solar charging, and with the availability of data from the national medical account repository, a holistic understanding of the patient’s health will be realized, thus enabling access to accurate and timely information to deliver the right care. This is vital in healthcare, where a single decision can make the difference between life and death.

Our system is made out of 80% waste 3D printed plastic unlike existing systems thus eco-friendly.

Vitex can be used in occupied rooms without the risk of causing cancer and cataracts unlike existing systems. These devices only work in unoccupied rooms which reduces their coverage as many Ugandan hospitals are always occupied and congested. Vitex further sterilizes medical supplies like masks, oxygen sensors and nasal prongs within the device unlike existing systems. Our lamp with an expectancy of 18.3 years can effectively sanitize hands in 3 seconds thus reducing costs for recurrent hand sanitizer procurement hence very cost-effective and unique.

We expect to serve over 18,250 people in the course of one year.

Approximately service provision per device - 50 patients and sanitise 10 rooms per day (18,250 patients and 3,650 rooms per annum).

Our anticipated community impact is a reduction of  morbidity and mortality rates especially in maternal and neonates and antimicrobial resistance mitigation. These resultantly will increase  lifespan and survival.

Vitex will enable saving of staff wages; the average monthly salary in Uganda ranges between $122 to $1,972 per medic.

Reduction in cost of sanitisation and associated equipment damage due to detergents, steam and alcohol based sanitizers. 

We expect rolling out the product to more rural and urban health facilities with poor sanitation protocols and low per-capital health care expenditures. We will use both gross (i.e., price of the product × number of units sold) and net (i.e., gross revenue - commissions - discounts – returns) revenue to summarize the financial health of our innovation. We intend country wide scaling by partnering with ministry of health, national associations of medical practitioners; private and public hospitals.  The system will be evaluated by 1000 patient users and 60 medical practitioners and scaling up effected in rural health Centres III, IV &V (1000). Registration of individual citizens will be at birth, registration hot spots and on hospital admissions. The users’ adoption of our system will be assessed using the medical application evaluation framework (Wright & Sittig, 2008; New Zealand 2017) with a focus on architectural, usability, functionality, effectiveness and efficiency features. In the long run, we will additionally rate the overall project success in terms of number of  medical facilities that adopted the system, number of individual users.

We shall conduct evaluation using formative and summative phases. The formative phase will be periodically to assess adherence of the implementation process to the project’s objectives.

Periodic assessment of actual number of infection cases and collecting Secondary data from health authorities regarding hospital infections prior to project implementation to form the baseline for trend analysis of hospital infections; measuring the interest of the local authorities to support and adopt the intervention program in health centers.

 Performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking device performance include:

• Device’s disinfectantion coverage - the total square meter of space disinfected per duration. Our device is expected to provide at least 80% reduction in the rate of nosocomial infections in hospitals.
• Device usage coverage- the percentage of time to distribute supplies to patients should improve by 40% over the manual processes thereby enabling nurses concentrate on other critical issues. That is, the percentage of nurses needed to administer supplies should reduce by at least 40%.
• Device Heat map: A daily and weekly report will present a visual representation of the route covered by the device and identify areas the device could not get to probably due to obstacles.

The KPIs will be measured as follows : Measure of the device’s disinfectant coverage area per duration to be done with the support of trained volunteers ; focused group interviews with patients, medical personnels, administrators and train volunteers to assess usage effectiveness of the intervention.

Uganda and other middle and low-income countries are faced with health problems such as high rate of nosocomial infections, emerging diseases like Ebola, pandemics, and recurrent cases of hospital-acquired infections (HAI).

We have developed a smart medical tool equipped with an intelligent remote sensing and a low-cost sterilizing system that uses far ultraviolet (UV) light to disinfect both air and floor surfaces. It is equipped with intelligent remote communication capabilities between the patient and the medical professionals. The targeted stakeholders for this tool include hospitals, hospice, and other long-term care facilities

The goal of the medical assistance tool is to improve access to safe healthcare, reduce infections, improve patient record management and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of our hospitals in meeting the basic clinical needs of patients by reducing the work load of the few medical personnel.

Our anticipated community impact is a reduction of the morbidity and mortality rates due to improvement in sanitation, antimicrobial resistant strainmitigation. Improved patient record management this will enable easier management of patient history, making it easier to respond to patient needs.

Limitations include: lack of funding for prototype enhancement, challenges of constant electricity supply, and procurement of materials and testing. For us to achieve the desired impact, we make the following assumptions: acquisition of funds to scale the tool, support from medical practitioners, clearing government health regulatory process, computer literacy skills to use the tool, demand growth and the adoption and procurement of the system. The COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitates limited human to human contact may further spur the need to adopt this tool in healthcare facilities.

Our first prototype was tested in 4 hospitals in Uganda and received positive reviews and feedback. We hope to replicate and test our enhanced smart prototype in Uganda at this stage, and extend the test to two other sub-Saharan African countries (Nigeria and Kenya). Mass awareness will be raised through conferences, advertisements, engagement with government and health institutions and practitioners to increase the tools adoption. The adoption of our technology will be evaluated using the enhanced technology adoption model developed by (Sabi, Uzoka, Langmia and Njeh 2016), which takes` cognizance of    contextual factors.

Vitex is an integrated eco-friendly system which utilizes antimicrobial materials; Plactive an1(tm). These copper and nano copper filaments  continuously eliminate dangerous pathogens up to 99.9%  on the device surface. Additionally, affordable 3D-printed materials made from 80% waste plastic are used.

This device sterilizes wards up to 99.99% , by employing  far UVC engine that can be used in occupied rooms. Far UVC light of 222nm kills pathogens efficiently regardless of their drug-resistant proficiency, but without skin and eye damaging effects associated with conventional germicidal UV exposure, thus no risk of cancer and cataracts, therefore, it can work in typical Ugandan hospitals, which are always occupied and congested facilities unlike conventional systems that work in unoccupied rooms. Vitex further sterilizes medical supplies like masks, water, and oxygen sensors within the device.

Vitex  spots latest in artificial intelligence to improve patient care and practitioner assistance. It can also hold medications and other regular supplies such as water, snacks, and napkins.

The device spots a Powerful Artificial Intelligence package that
incorporates Intel Real Sense, auto-follow, video capture, touch &
voice control, playful expressions, and personality to keep patients in a
cheerful mood. In fact, Vitex includes over-the-air updates making it
viable for endless integration, including providing seamless data access
for important time-sensitive decision-making through elaborate
integrations.

Our team is composed of 2 female and 4 male team members from different geographical areas of Europe, North America and Africa. This will improve equity among the team. 

Our system will work foe both male and female patients and practitioners thus gender neutral.

• Projected cost at scale - $4,000 per device
• Approximate service provision per device - 50 patients and sanitise 10 rooms per day (18,250 patients and 3,650 rooms per annum).
• Approximate cost per day in the first year of use - $1.05.
• Vitex will enable saving of staff wages; the average monthly salary in Uganda ranges between $122 to $1,972 per medic.
• Reduction in cost of sanitation and associated equipment damage due to detergents, steam and alcohol based sanitizers.
• Reduction in the costs associated with Hospital Acquired Infections and prevention of deaths. Similar yet less superior innovations include Rwandan Zora robot ($30,000), Rwanda’s disinfecting system ($70,000) and Xenex disinfecting machine ($120,000). The Rwandan Zora robot misses a lot of the AI-based patient care, practitioner assistance, AI-based diagnostics and Eco-friendliness that Vitex presents, besides having to be pushed around. Vitex’s comparative advantage is in its ability to disinfect, enable communication and manage patient records; all in one device.

We will sell  Vitex device  at a cost  of around $4000.

The software will be leased to the government at a rate of 10 dollars a patient for 6 months . Our innovation is not narrowly context-specific since it is applicable to any healthcare facility anywhere in the world, but most importantly in low-middle income countries with overburdened health systems. In addition, this innovation is guided by the principles of cost-effectiveness (built into the design) and sustainability (derived for potential scale-up.

It is our expectation that the Ministry of health, government hospitals and private healthcare facilities will buy more or lease Vitex robotic devices.

We received initial funding from the Government of Uganda under the
Research and Innovation Fund (RIF) through Makerere University of
$15,000.

For long term stability we will work on both commercial and charity-based initiatives to cover the rural facilities.

It is our expectation that the Ministry of health, government
hospitals and private healthcare facilities will buy more or lease Vitex
robotic devices. We have sold one unit to a health facility in Gwaafu, Uganda.