Please tell us a little about your day job.
I work at Partners In Health, a global health non-profit organization. We work with local governments in 10 countries to help strengthen their health care systems, by building infrastructure, training staff and implementing a community health worker model to reach the poorest people in rural settings. I’m the Coordinator for the Medical Informatics team – our team has developed an open-source electronic medical record (EMR) system, called OpenMRS, to make it easy and effective to collect and store critical patient health information.
What are you passionate about?
I’m passionate about taking lessons learned from other industries and applying them to public health initiatives. If it works well in one field, why couldn’t it be adapted to another?
What are you doing (or would like to do) to “hack” health care?
One specific project I’m working on involves telemedicine with our radiology department at a teaching hospital in Haiti, which currently doesn’t have a radiologist on site. We’ve set up the infrastructure and network so that digital images can easily be accessed and read by radiologists in the US. With the technology that exists today, telemedicine is something that is possible to achieve and can be vital if certain communities simply don’t have the HR capacity or experience needed.
Why are you attending HealthCamp Boston?
I’m interested in hearing other projects that are happening in Boston and beyond – I have a hunch there are similar initiatives being pursued, and maybe we can join forces or discuss best practices.
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