Dimagi has been awarded a phase II SBIR contract from the US National Institute of Health and National Cancer Institute to work on home-based cancer care coordination.

There are more than 10 million people in the United States with a history of cancer and approximately 1.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year. With improvements in cancer care, more patients are living with cancer than ever before. Their dominant sites of care are also moving to the home and outpatient clinics. As patients spend more time physically removed from their providers, proper communication and coordination become even more important to deliver quality care. Patients and their caregivers need new electronic technologies to facilitate effective coordination in this new and changing environment.

Our strategy for meeting this challenge is to combine user centric design principles with innovative software technologies to develop communication systems that span the home, community and hospital. User studies with patients, informal caregivers and providers guide our software design process. Some of the technologies include web services and interactive voice response to connect patients using home health devices, their informal caregivers using cellular phones and websites, and providers using hospital-based electronic medical records. We have partnered with a leading home health device company, an eHealth Initiative Community, Boston Medical Center, and the nation’s oldest visiting nurses association, VNA of Boston.

For more information, please contact us.

We are implementing FogBugz (from FogCreek / Joel on Software) at Dimagi and our team will be blogging about our experiences with it and the customizations we are adding.  We’ve spent a lot of time and effort over the past many months attempting to use a variety of products, including Basecamp, ActivCollab, DotProject, MS Project, and Excel/Google spreadsheet (which was actually working the best).  All of these didn’t do something quite right, which made us keep searching for a better solution.  Hopefully FogBugz is our answer.  At least we have complete access to the database so we can get out any types of reports we need. (note: you can find a list of the

We may not fit the ideal profile of a FogBugz company (or a profitable company, for that matter) in that we have many clients, many projects, many collaborators, and many collaboration tools that we use.

Currently:

SmartCare in Zambia is running on MS Team Foundation Server, we are collaborating with developers in Zambia as well as MS Trainers in Dubai and the States using the system.

JavaRosa is a collaboration with groups in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Bangaldesh and more and we are using Trac as the collaboration suite for that.

ASHand is a completely internal product and we will be using FogBugz only for its project management.

Part of the reason it has been so hard for us to find a working project management tool is the wide variety of projects we work on and the different tools all of them use.  Also, we have many other collaborators.  We may run into some hurdles trying to use FogBugz in the way that we want, and we’ll look to share that information.

Some current tools we are thinking about building for FogBugz:

1.  A web based timesheet editor that provides a week long view and entry system.

2.  A script to import from TFS work items and Trac tickets.

3.  Custom reports that we can use for billing purposes and planning purposes.