An app helps save lives

Fran Simon fsimon@tulane.edu
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Jennifer Farrell, right, teaches a woman in Dhaka, Bangladesh, how to take a pulse, as Dr. Bernard Jaffe, center, watches the training session. (Photo from Dr. Bernard Jaffe)

Jennifer Farrell took a year off from medical school to launch an emergency medical communications app in Bangladesh, a country that didn"t have an emergency medical service and where people couldn"t summon first-responders with a 911 call. With a Fulbright scholarship and on leave from Tulane School of Medicine, Farrell spearheaded the development of CriticaLink, a mobile health social enterprise that summons volunteer first-responders.

Farrell"s mentor, Dr. Bernard Jaffe, director of the Tulane Global Trauma Education Program, has spent years in Southeast Asia training lay people to become first-responders with medical emergency skills. But the communication piece was missing, says Jaffe, a professor emeritus of surgery at Tulane.

Farrell, who is in Dhaka, Bangladesh, received notice this fall that CriticaLink won the World App Awards in Health. The award will be presented during the 2016 Group of Twenty (G20) World Summit in China in January.

Recognition is not new to Farrell, who was selected as a White House Young Global Entrepreneur and represented CriticaLink at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit with President Barack Obama in Nairobi, Kenya, this year.

Farrell"s dream is for the app to expand internationally. She is working with mobile company MiakiVAS, CriticaLink partner"s in Bangladesh, to launch the app in Myanmar, and she has received partnership offers from potential partners in South Africa, Botswana and Nigeria.

Jaffe shares a letter from Farrell, describing an incident in August after a meeting with more than 100 CriticaLink volunteers in Mali: “There was a massive road accident in Banani just in front of us. There was a mother, a father and two babies on a rickshaw and it got hit hard by a car. Everyone was thrown from the rickshaw but one of the babies was thrown into traffic ... I"ve never seen anything so horrid in my life…”

Fortunately the EMS-trained volunteers were there moments after the accident. With the Global Trauma Education Program and the CriticaLINK app, prompt emergency care is possible in Bangladesh.