In this session, we will bring together medical and legal stakeholders from Kenya who have partnered with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) to launch MediCapt, an award-winning mobile app aimed at collecting, documenting, preserving, and safely transmitting forensic medical evidence of sexual violence from the clinic to the courtroom. Over the last four years, PHR has been working collaboratively with end-users to design, develop, and field test MediCapt in East and Central Africa to ensure the app is feasible, usable, and sustainable for doctors, nurses, police officers, lawyers, and judges, in resource¬-constrained, conflict, or post-¬conflict contexts. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where PHR has been field-testing the app, there are few examples of electronic medical record systems or legal case management systems with which to integrate, so the app offers a new form of documentation. But what about contexts such as Kenya where such technologies and digital systems do exist in some locations and the resources, capacities, and skill levels across the medical, law enforcement, and legal sectors vary wildly? The roll out of MediCapt in Kenya has raised new challenges and opportunities concerning the app’s tech design, security, feasibility, usability, information and work flows, and its sustainability at medical facilities, at police stations, and in courts. For MediCapt in Kenya, the disruption of existing documentation and security processes -- and the opportunities for positive and constructive impact -- are both very real.
After a brief overview of the MediCapt app and the context in which it has been built, the roundtable participants will share their experience launching this app in Kenya from their respective standpoints: medical, law enforcement, legal, and technological. The objective of the session is for the roundtable participants to exchange ideas, and to share lessons learned with active and engaged participants in the audience, all with the goal of working toward articulating innovative approaches for responding to these challenges. This session is intended to be very interactive, and we will solicit engagement and concrete, solutions-oriented feedback from key participants in the audience, including, ideally, clinicians, technologists, trial attorneys from international courts or tribunals, human rights activists, as well as ethicists, privacy specialists, and government officials, among others.
