Raa Labs and the Red Cross save lives together
Raa Labs participated in a recent event to help the Red Cross save more lives through the use of digital tools.
Providing the right health care can often be a difficult task, especially in rural or remote places where important information and medical care is scarce or non-existent. Having a simple system available for people to report and share health-related information themselves has not been possible — until now.
Digital competence meets purpose
The Red Cross Codeathon is an initiative to bring the programmer community together in an effort to build tools that enable the Red Cross to become more efficient and better positioned to save lives. All involved provide their time and effort for free, showing what is possible when digital competence meets purpose. Recently, Raa Labs joined the Codeathon and hacked together with about 60 other programmers and software developers to create a new version of the Community Based Surveillance (CBS) system that has been developed for the Red Cross through previous Codeathons.
The CBS platform aims to let people around the world, especially in rural areas with poor information and medical coverage, report on local health risks to retrieve the right health care as early as possible. It also allows for early detection of potential health risk and disease outbreaks, ensuring that you can start to save lives and stop disease outbreaks turning into large scale epidemics and pandemics at an earlier point in time. Normally it takes a lot of cases before the outbreak is noticed. With the CBS system, you can act much earlier. This allows you to save more lives and decrease the expansion of the epidemic.
Giving a little to get a lot
By providing our time, competence and effort to the Red Cross Codeathon initiative, Raa Labs play a part in this important work that ensures the Red Cross is better equipped to meet emergencies.
“Proving the viability of our competence for such a great purpose is really a win/win situation”
“It is very satisfying to be able to take part in such an effort”, says Anders Gill, Lead Data Scientist at Raa Labs. “Also, being part of such a large developer community working for a common good cause is very inspiring”. He is supported by Ari Marjamaa, “Proving the viability of our competence for such a great purpose is really a win/win situation”, concludes Ari.
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Raa Labs focuses on enabling the maritime logistics industry to leverage technology efficiently, improving performance, reducing cost and meeting regulatory requirements. If that means developing new services or products, or even changing your business model, we’ll support you all the way. Raa Labs works with clients in the maritime industry through advisory on digital issues, project support and technology deliveries.
Raa Labs is owned 50/50 by the Wilhelmsen Group and Wallenius Wilhelmsen. For more information see raalabs.com
