Erica Frenkel: The universal anesthesia machine

I'm going to talk to you today

about the design of medical technology for low-resource settings.

I study health systems in these countries.

And one of the major gaps in care,

almost across the board,

is access to safe surgery.

Now one of the major bottlenecks that we've found

that's sort of preventing both the access in the first place,

and the safety of those surgeries that do happen, is anesthesia.

And actually, it's the model that we expect to work

for delivering anesthesia in these environments.

Here, we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the US,

or any other developed country.

In the background there

is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine.

And this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives

because it was designed with this environment in mind.

In order to operate, this machine needs a number of things

that this hospital has to offer.

It needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist

with years of training with complex machines

to help her monitor the flows of the gas

and keep her patients safe and anesthetized

throughout the surgery.

It's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms,

and it needs special care, TLC, to keep it up and running,

and it's going to break pretty easily.

And when it does, it needs a team of biomedical engineers

who understand its complexities, can fix it, can source the parts

and keep it saving lives.

It's a pretty expensive machine.

It needs a hospital whose budget can allow it

to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $100,000.

And perhaps most obviously,

but also most importantly --

and the path to concepts that we've heard about

kind of illustrates this --

it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity,

of compressed oxygen, and other medical supplies

that are so critical to the functioning of this machine.

In other words, this machine requires a lot of stuff

that this hospital cannot offer.

This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi.

In this hospital,

there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia,

and she's qualified

because she has 12, maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia.

In the hospital and in the entire region

there's not a single biomedical engineer.

So when this machine breaks,

the machines that they have to work with break,

they've got to try and figure it out,

but most of the time, that's the end of the road.

Those machines go the proverbial junkyard.

And the price tag of the machine that I mentioned

could represent maybe a quarter or a third

of the annual operating budget for this hospital.

And finally, I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong.

This hospital is connected to a very weak power grid,

one that goes down frequently.

So it runs frequently, the entire hospital,

just on a generator.

And you can imagine, the generator breaks down

or runs out of fuel.

And the World Bank sees this

and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country

can expect up to 18 power outages per month.

Similarly, compressed oxygen and other medical supplies

are really a luxury,

and can often be out of stock for months or even a year.

So it seems crazy, but the model that we have right now

is taking those machines that were designed

for that first environment that I showed you

and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment.

It's not just inappropriate,

it becomes really unsafe.

One of our partners at Johns Hopkins

was observing surgeries in Sierra Leone about a year ago.

And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case.

A woman came in, she needed an emergency C-section

to save her life and the life of her baby.

And everything began pretty auspiciously.

The surgeon was on call and scrubbed in.

The nurse was there.

She was able to anesthetize her quickly, and it was important

because of the emergency nature of the situation.

And everything began well

until the power went out.

And now in the middle of this surgery,

the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case,

which he can do -- he's got a headlamp.

But the nurse is literally running around a darkened operating theater

trying to find anything she can use to anesthetize her patient,

to keep her patient asleep.

Because her machine doesn't work when there's no power.

This routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced,

and others are probably the product of, has now become a tragedy.

And what's so frustrating is this is not a singular event;

this happens across the developing world.

35 million surgeries are attempted every year

without safe anesthesia.

My colleague, Dr. Paul Fenton, was living this reality.

He was the chief of anesthesiology

in a hospital in Malawi, a teaching hospital.

He went to work every day

in an operating theater like this one,

trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so

using that same equipment

that became so unreliable, and frankly unsafe, in his hospital.

And after umpteen surgeries

and, you can imagine, really unspeakable tragedy,

he just said, "That's it. I'm done. That's enough.

There has to be something better."

He took a walk down the hall

to where they threw all those machines that had just crapped out on them,

I think that's the scientific term,

and he started tinkering.

He took one part from here and another from there,

and he tried to come up with a machine that would work

in the reality that he was facing.

And what he came up with:

was this guy.

The prototype for the Universal Anesthesia Machine --

a machine that would work and anesthetize his patients

no matter the circumstances that his hospital had to offer.

Here it is, back at home

at that same hospital, developed a little further, 12 years later,

working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics.

Let me show you a little bit about how this machine works.

Voila!

Here she is.

When you have electricity,

everything in this machine begins in the base.

There's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there.

Now you've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point.

Essentially, to deliver anesthesia, you want as pure oxygen as possible,

because eventually you're going to dilute it, essentially, with the gas.

And the mixture that the patient inhales

needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen

or else it can become dangerous.

But so in here when there's electricity,

the oxygen concentrator takes in room air.

Now we know room air is gloriously free,

it is abundant,

and it's already 21 percent oxygen.

So all this concentrator does is take that room air in, filter it

and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here,

where it mixes with the anesthetic agent.

Now before that mixture hits the patient's lungs,

it's going to pass by here -- you can't see it,

but there's an oxygen sensor here --

that's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered.

Now if you don't have power,

or, God forbid, the power cuts out in the middle of a surgery,

this machine transitions automatically,

without even having to touch it,

to drawing in room air from this inlet.

Everything else is the same.

The only difference is that now

you're only working with 21 percent oxygen.

Now that used to be a dangerous guessing game,

because you only knew if you gave too little oxygen

once something bad happened.

But we've put a long-life battery backup on here.

This is the only part that's battery backed up.

But this gives control to the provider, whether there's power or not,

because they can adjust the flows

based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they're giving the patient.

In both cases, whether you have power or not,

sometimes the patient needs help breathing.

It's just a reality of anesthesia, the lungs can be paralyzed.

And so we've just added this manual bellows.

We've seen surgeries for three or four hours

to ventilate the patient on this.

So it's a straightforward machine.

I shudder to say simple; it's straightforward.

And it's by design.

You do not need to be a highly trained, specialized anesthesiologist

to use this machine,

which is good because, in these rural district hospitals,

you're not going to get that level of training.

It's also designed for the environment that it will be used in.

This is an incredibly rugged machine.

It has to stand up to the heat and the wear and tear

that happens in hospitals in these rural districts.

And so it's not going to break very easily,

but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine

can be swapped out and replaced

with a hex wrench and a screwdriver.

And finally, it's affordable.

This machine comes in at an eighth of the cost

of the conventional machine that I showed you earlier.

So in other words, what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery

and save lives,

because it was designed for its environment,

just like the first machine I showed you.

But we're not content to stop there.

Is it working?

Is this the design that's going to work in place?

Well, we've seen good results so far.

This is in 13 hospitals in four countries,

and since 2010, we've done well over 2,000 surgeries

with no clinically adverse events.

So we're thrilled.

This really seems like a cost-effective, scalable solution

to a problem that's really pervasive.

But we still want to be sure

that this is the most effective and safe device

that we can be putting into hospitals.

So to do that, we've launched a number of partnerships

with NGOs and universities,

to gather data on the user interface,

on the types of surgeries it's appropriate for,

and ways we can enhance the device itself.

One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins

just here in Baltimore.

They have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in Baltimore.

So we're taking this machine

and recreating some of the operating theater crises

that this machine might face

in one of the hospitals that it's intended for,

and in a contained, safe environment,

evaluating its effectiveness.

We're then able to compare the results from that study

with real-world experience,

because we're putting two of these in hospitals

that Johns Hopkins works with in Sierra Leone,

including the hospital where that emergency C-section happened.

So I've talked a lot about anesthesia, and I tend to do that.

I think it is incredibly fascinating and an important component of health.

And it really seems peripheral, we never think about it,

until we don't have access to it,

and then it becomes a gatekeeper.

Who gets surgery and who doesn't?

Who gets safe surgery and who doesn't?

But you know, it's just one of so many ways

that design, appropriate design,

can have an impact on health outcomes.

If more people in the health-delivery space

really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries

could start their design process, their solution search,

from outside of that proverbial box

and inside of the hospital --

In other words, if we could design

for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world,

rather than the one that we wished existed --

we might just save a lot of lives.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)