This TED Talk features health informatician SoyMumba, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

Like every passionate software engineer out there, I closely follow technology companies in Silicon Valley.

Pretty much the same way soccer fans follow their teams in Europe.

I read articles on tech blogs and listen to podcasts on my phone.

But after I finish the article, lock my phone, and unplug the headphones,

I'm back in sub-Saharan Africa, where the landscape is not quite the same.

We have long and frequent power outages,

low penetration of computers,

slow internet connections,

and a lot of patients visiting understaffed hospitals.

Since the HIV epidemic,

hospitals have been struggling to manage regular HIV treatment records for increasing volumes of patients.

For such environments, importing technology systems developed elsewhere has not worked.

But in 2006, I joined Bob Health, a team that uses locally based engineers to develop suitable interventions

that are addressing healthcare challenges in Malawi.

We designed an electronic health record system that is used by healthcare workers while seeing patients.

And in the process, we realized that we not only had to design the software,

we had to implement the infrastructure as well.

We don't have enough medical staff to comprehensively examine every patient,

so embedded clinical guidelines within the software

to guide nurses and clerks who assist with handling some of the workload.

Everyone has a birthday, but not everyone knows their birthday. So we wrote algorithms to handle

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