Wired reports:
More here...“If you’ve got a barely literate medical technician, who only knows how to use a microscope to look for Malaria and fill in a form, you can’t just put a fancy computer in front of him and expect him to use it.”
Image courtesy of eHealth Nigeria
The answer is to use technology that fits the environment — or at least comes close to fitting. Under the aegis of their nonprofit, eHealth Nigeria, Castle and Thompson (founders of eHealth Nigeria ) have built a digital records system meant to eventually serve healthcare facilities across the region, but it doesn’t use the sort of specialized health care software in U.S. or even everyday database software. There’s no Kaiser software. And no Microsoft. The system is based on OpenMRS, an open source health records system designed specifically for use in underdeveloped regions.
First created in 2004, OpenMRS is now used in countries across the globe, including Rwanda, Mozambique, Haiti, India, China, and the Phillipines. As Karlyn and others point out, the platform is hardly reinventing healthcare in the poorer parts of these countries, but it is having some success — eHealth Nigeria being a prime example. “It’s really just a drop in the bucket — but that’s important,” Karlyn tells Wired. “But they’re building confidence in the system, demonstrating how change can happen. That attracts resources, and eventually, that makes a difference.”
OpenMRS began as a research project spanning Indiana University and Eldoret, Kenya’s Moi University. Paul Biondich and Burke Mamlin, two physicians and investigators at Indiana’s Regenstrief Institute, had spent time in Kenya, where a local health institution was using Microsoft Access to help support HIV care, and they saw first hand that the database wouldn’t suit the project at hand. OpenMRS was their response.
0 comments:
Post a Comment