On January 27th, 2010, Opendream together with Google.org, DTAC, InSTEDD, ChangeFusion and Bureau of Epidemiology, Ministry of Public Health annouced a collaboration on implementing a GeoChat too more than 800 hospitals nationwide for Influenza-like-illness (ILI) reporting via DTAC's SMS gateway.

We're working harder than last year for making the use of GeoChat into wider target, working groups; From citizen journalist to normal people.

Official press release here.

We're at Mukdahan, Thailand with InSTEDD for implementing a mobile collaboration messaging platform, GeoChat.

We'd a great hacking night last night. Our team and InSTEDD developers have made sure that every bits of GeoChat is workable, properly and perfect, therefore Mukdahan's Public Health team can continue use GeoChat as their toll for communication and reporting. Faster getting information from the field means faster disease outbreak response.

We went to MBDS ICT Forum which held at Mukdahan during 2nd - 3rd April, 2009. There were 6 counties along Meakhong basin region, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, attended the forum. Opendream and ChangeFusion went there for supporting our technology partner, InSTEDD, pilot run an intuitive mobile reporting system, GeoChat, for disease surveillance at Mukdahan, and cross border with Savarnnakhet, Laos in the future.

We also gave technology talk about emerging technology for supporting rapid surveillance report and diseases data visualisation on the 2nd day, it was excited and fun!

The outcome along with MBDS ICT master plan are the solid idea of internationalise GeoChat to this region, starting from Mukdahan, we're working on a standardised SMS format for rapid surveillance report and Thai localisation. On top of that, we also met Google.org predict and prevent program's director, Mark Smolinski, who gave us a valuable idea for localising GeoChat to this region.

We believed that an emerging technology helps people know the epidemic faster.