TRACE

A middleman system engaging public and private stakeholders for coordinated distribution of emergency services to the Ugandan population, mainly rural areas, in cost-friendly and resource limited settings.

Emergency Medical Services are an essential public health intervention toward saving people’s lives and providing timely and efficient pre-hospital emergency medical care to the sick from diseases and injured after trauma. On a global scale, despite the numerous engagements and strategies to improve the interventions, there are a recorded 28.3 million deaths due to Emergency Medical Diseases and about 1.4 million people dying annually from road traffic crashes. 

Currently, 90% of all deaths from road traffic injuries occur in Low-and –middle-income Countries with Africa being no exception, where in Uganda, there's no formal pre-hospital emergency care system despite the rapidly growing burdens of Road traffic accidents, incidences of non-communicable diseases, and complications of infectious diseases. This is due to factors such as the lack of a formal Emergency Medical System, and lack of emergency and communications systems that are leading to a major hindrance to the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 3 of ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all ages.

According to the 2014 Uganda Police Crime and Traffic Report, 3,000 people die on Ugandan roads in accidents, with deaths out of 13,500 survivors attributed to delayed emergency response.

Our solution suggests the use of the Trace System, a centralized tracking and surveillance system that responds to emergencies in a revised protocol of command through either the, 1)Trace application software that is a portal through which emergencies can be reported, shows nearby emergency hotspots in a person’s location, enlists ambulance providers or health insurances that can be accessed at a person’s convenience and provides routes to the nearest health facility which provides emergency support, and 2) use of Unstructured Supplemented Service Data(USSD) through which a uniform toll-free number and other emergency services such as first aid guidance will be availed to cater for the general population. 

The Trace System will engage the transportation sector for the deployment of vehicles and various automobiles such as motorcycles and three-wheeled cycles that will be equipped with the prerequisite affordable and necessary equipment. This will be reinforced by building a healthcare workforce community of professional drivers, middle-level providers, and specialized physicians nurtured with basic and skilled management of emergency responses for service delivery. 

The Trace System will progressively stabilize the Emergency Medical Services of Uganda and other Low-to-middle Income Countries by creating a unified platform for coordinated networking of emergency services to the population through health facilities.

On becoming a reality, this idea has the potential of benefiting Low-to-middle Income Countries that have large population masses with a staggering Emergency Medical System to cater to all of them and henceforth will save an astronomical number of lives to ensure sustainable living. These will, as well as help, lessen the burden of poverty that precedes death most especially for family heads from road traffic accidents.

We are a multi-disciplinary team of undergraduate students from Makerere University and Mbarara University of Science and Technology that is as well partnering with project management and innovation firms.

Some of the team members are;

Karlos Samuel, a medical student with experience in development and management of community engagement projects where he has served in numerous capacities on top of his leadership, management and clinical skills. 

Sseruwamikisa Marvin is a medical student who has also participated in numerous projects as a leader and also volunteer. 

Hellen is a biomedical engineer with knowledge in development of applications and systems but also coding in programming languages

Kisiriko Solomon is a physiotherapist who recently won a grant in innovation against antimicrobial drug resistance and has interest in emergency medicine. He has volunteered in community projects and has good clinical skills and patient handling. 

Ajuna Micheal and Nsamba Joseph are medicine students at Makerere University who are pioneers for emergency medicine and have prolific talent in team coordination and leadership.

We have been able to carry out surveys and send out questionnaires where 9 of the 13 customers we met with validated Few ambulances leading to delays in responding to and transporting emergency victims, High expenses associated with ambulance services and Nonfunctional centralized tollfree number to allow coordinated response as the major problems they are facing.

We have interviewed over 30 individuals and 19 of them are positive they can utilize the TRACE platform

The Trace System stands out from other interventions because first of all, it’s the first of its kind in Uganda because the public emergency providers are uncoordinated and have few ambulances while the private emergency service providers who can provide ambulances to the Ugandan population operate independently, employ technological interventions that are limited for their profitability and are associated with high expenses upon delivery.

Trace has an outstanding benefit in that it will initiate pickup of emergency victims from places of incidence because the current system only allows ambulances to do referrals between hospitals due to the few ambulances.

The System will ensure manageable ambulance prices for the population and encourage management of infections from their point of inception and this will help save money spent on drugs to overcome infectious complications.

Our impact goal is that we are able to service over 5000 people through our platform by next year. 

We aim to achieve this by adhering to our implementation plan which is multiphase for the next year period with specified activities for a specified period.

We will first of all engage the various stakeholders and then carrying on with system design and development thereafter carry on with various implementation strategies.

Our system employs software and mobile application that uses GPS tracking technology that can be highly useful for emergency services to reach them without delay and ensure that they get proper medical treatment before it’s too late. 

The Trace system comes with an in-built SOS button that they can use to let you know they need help, which also simultaneously alert emergency services.

The GPS Tracking technology can be implemented in resource limited settings and with minimal effort on both a personal level and an institutional level to counteract many hurdles when it comes to ensuring access to support and attention.

Trace also uses Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code through which people can interact with us where a mobile user sends a request for ambulance and supplementary services through availed USSD Code, the USSD gateway forwards it to the user's USSD application, which responds to the request.

We haven't yet launched our idea but we are planning to serve over 5000 people in the next year

Currently, we are having both financial and technical limitations. Financially, we aren't able to proceed with system design and development because of insufficient funds. Technically, the available team isn't well positioned to carry on the project, more technical support needed.

Inability for some stakeholders to agree to technological advances yet a significant number of people lose their lives or are seriously affected by the inaccessibility of proper resources or attention which technology can solve.

Currently, we aren't in partnerships with any organizations but we are in talk with a few like Association of Ambulance Professionals in Uganda

We aim to bring in money to fund our work through Subscription fees by partners, Ride transaction fess, Leasing fees, Premium subscriptions by customers, Surge fees and License fees