Drs. Karst, Ramos participate in rural health panel
Two UNMC faculty members — Greg Karst, Ph.D., executive associate dean of the College of Allied Health Professions, and Athena Ramos, Ph.D., community health program manager of the College of Public Health — recently served on a rural health panel discussion in Auburn, Neb.
Drs. Karst and Ramos are Fellows of the University of Nebraska’s Rural Futures Institute. They were joined by Kyle Ryan, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology at Peru State College, and Marty Fattig, CEO of Nemaha County Hospital. The panel discussion focused on the largest opportunities for growth in rural community health care and ways communities can benefit from enhanced access to health care and community health resources. The event was a joint project between RFI and Rural Impact Hub. Watch a livestreamed recording of the discussion here.
UNMC professor wins first place with promising mobile innovation
Stephen Obaro, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., UNMC professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases, is part of a team that won a $300,000 first place award in a competition for the latest connected innovations designed to address critical issues facing the global community.
Vodafone Americas Foundation presented its 10th annual Wireless Innovation Project awards at the Social Innovation Summit 2018 in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Dr. Obaro’s project is called SMART (Sickle and Malaria Accurate Remote Testing). It is a point-of-care device with a mobile app running on smart phones and tablets that links patient data with an electronic medical record system. The result is a connected point-of-care platform for diagnosing, treating, and following up with sickle cell disease (SCD) and malaria patients in low resource communities. It involves Case Western Reserve University, Hemex Health, UNMC, and eHealth Africa.
It is estimated that SCD affects nearly 25 million people globally, and 50 to 80 percent of infants born with SCD in Africa die before age 5, while 3.4 billion people are at risk of malaria, with 212 million cases and 429,000 deaths occurring annually.
Each winner explains their innovation in a video available here. To watch the video about SMART, cue to 2:47.