OFTALKOLDA, An eye-health project in Senegal

The OFTALKOLDA Project is a tele-medicine project, whose aim is to diagnose and treat patients in locations where there are no ophthalmologic specialists available. Through a web-based system, ophthalmologists in the capital are able to access patient records from countryside areas posted by general practitioners, so they can analyze those cases and prescribe a treatment that will be applied in the rural health offices. Given that, there is a need for having computers in those health offices, in order to access the system and not only to report new cases, but also to follow up the progress of the patient. Moreover, if these computers can be easily transported (that is the case of laptops), the practitioner would be able to move from different health offices and even to reach those patients with more difficulties to reach health facilities.