Mission
Enhance the effectiveness of healthcare systems in combatting infectious diseases.
Philosophy
Healthcare systems are burdened and can struggle to effectively manage infectious diseases. This burden is more prominently observed in low resource settings where the healthcare infrastructure is not as developed and there are fewer healthcare workers. We seek to enhance the effectiveness of these burdened systems by providing tools that pipeline the disease surveillance process to help public health officials make informed decisions with openly accessible data. In doing so, we hope that limited resources, such as vector control chemicals, can be deployed more effectively and healthcare workers can be freed to address more critical matters.
Therefore, our values are:
- Accessibility of technology;
- Efficient use of resources;
- Openness of data and designs;
- Responsiveness to demanding environments.
Target Market
Our efforts will do the greatest good by addressing the needs of communities where infectious diseases have a disproportionate impact on the economic or social wellbeing of the population. Regions that are endemic-prone or can only be serviced by itinerant healthcare workers are of particular interest. In addition, initial partnerships are focused on a subset of those regions that are currently executing or are preparing to introduce community based initiatives for disease and outbreak surveillance.
Approach
Puccinelli Laboratories is developing a hardware and software ecosystem to provide real-time, spatiotemporal surveillance of infectious diseases. This system is designed to minimize the burden of surveillance efforts on healthcare infrastructure while also enabling data-informed public health policies to be implemented proactively for the health and safety of the community. As seen by efforts elsewhere, constant surveillance of a disease such as dengue fever allows the community to pinpoint emerging hotspots early and quickly deploy vector control measures to control the problem. In doing so, the disease places a much weaker burden on the health of the community and vector control resources are conserved since the problem was addressed before it had grown to be unmanageable.
The ecosystem being developed here is made possible by leveraging an affordable set of hardware and software utilities. The hardware consists of a field deployable point-of-care unit designed with a flexible interface to accommodate various diagnostic assays. Upon completion of the assay, diagnostic data is transmitted to an open source public health database where the results from all deployed systems are aggregated. Communities can access the data through a simple web portal to evaluate the effectiveness of current policies and consider implementing alternative approaches.