During the past three or so weeks, we have been working on a project with the palliative ward here at St. Gabriel’s. Currently, the hospital has a variety of paper records to keep track of their inpatient, outpatient, and home-based visits. Unfortunately, digging through tomes of registers and notebooks is anything but simple, and Alex, Suave, and Comfort spend countless hours compiling data at the end of every month. Their time could be much better spent with patients, as Suave does with outpatients on Tuesdays, or Alex at villagers’ homes every Monday and Friday.

A database of some sort was definitely in the works: something that’s simple, straightforward, and most importantly, secure. Over the past decade, NGOs and governments have poured millions of dollars into robust, open-source, web-based systems that mimic those used in the West. But using them is a dream in the warm heart of Africa, where internet consists of a skimpy, sporadic wireless 2G network. Rolling brownouts mean that any computer-based system can crumble in a few seconds. St. Gabriel’s needs a system that ties in with its paper records and compiles patient data with an intuitive, local interface. And so we developed a database in Microsoft Access.

Of course, we soon realized that a proprietary solution isn’t really a solution. An open source alternative would free St. Gabriel’s from the whims of software availability. After already developing the entire system over the past three weeks, we realize that our database, our “solution,” is anything but: it significantly restrains the hospital and is simply unreasonable. We could provide the hospital with a version using Microsoft Access to solve their short-term needs, but in the long run, we’re only perpetuating a harsh cycle of proprietary lockdown. Since we have practical open-source alternatives like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice, it makes sense for us to port the database to a more reasonable and sustainable end, to design an actual solution to the hospital’s needs. It seems like we now have yet another way to keep ourselves busy over the next few weeks…