Information, Communications Technology, and Development (ICTD)
Mobile Computing for Healthcare Information Management in Africa
Telecommunications Policy and Practice in Africa
I do information technology for healthcare in Africa. Actually, I've
also recently dabbled in solar powered lighting for a hospital in rural Nigeria, done some IT for education in Mexico, and helped out with wireless deployments in India,
so I've been known to think about other problems as well, but my primary focus (i.e. my dissertation) is on information technology for healthcare in Africa. My motivation runs something like this: (A) I'm pretty good (compared to some, not so much compared to a lot of my colleagues in TIER) at computers and actually get pretty obsessed with them at times. (B) God has placed a special and specific
compassion in my heart for the needs of Africa. Since I'm absolutely sure that (A) is not a coincidence, and because God has managed to do a lot of things in my life to make this possible, I'm using (A) to address (B).
On an academic end, my dissertation committee is Dean AnnaLee Saxenian (co-chair), Prof. John Chuang (co-chair), Prof. Eric Brewer and Prof. Jenna Burrell. My coursework and reading delves primarily into research methods, development theory, and healthcare and telecommunications policy. My work experience is in user interface and web application design, so my research also involves human-computer interaction, participatory design, and action research. By combining a theoretical approach with an experiential interaction, my work most closely approaches applied anthropology. My dissertation will be primarily ethnographic - although I am allocating six months (jan-jun 2009) to do a deployment, the remaining six months have been set aside in such a way that I will deliberately step back from my role as a technologist, both to ensure sustainability of the deployment in my absence, but also so I will have the time to observe social dynamics as they emerge around the deployment over time.
I helped found the still-nascent tiergroup.org (soon to be renamed De Novo Group?) and am also currently volunteering as a lecturer teaching Object-Oriented Programming in Java to 225+ first year students at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology Institute of Computer Science. You can follow my adventures and thoughts on the ictdchick blog or any of the other links at the top of the page. I know this page is sort of 1995, but that's the easiest way to make lots of info available in the lowest number of bytes on the web (without compressing the text).
Uganda: Claim Mobile
HealthyLife is a voucher program that reimburses existing service providers for services rendered. However, service providers are geographically distant, program management is information intensive and errors and other sources of delay affect service provision, quality of care, and payment timeliness. Claim Mobile is a dual web and mobile based platform designed to enable service providers to use mobile phones to submit formerly paper based claims digitally to a web-based application. The web application is additionally designed to cope with Internet infrastructure limitations found in Mbarara, Uganda, and supports asynchronous synchronization between locally and globally available web server, to enable access to claims data even when Internet access may be prohibitively slow or unavailable.
Nigeria: Women's Emergency Rural Communications and Reliable Electricity (WECARE)
WECARE is a joint project with Laura Stachel (School of Public Health), Christian Casillas (Energy and Resources), Hal Aronson (Solar Schoolhouse), and Drew Sproul (Adax), originally proposed as part of the annual Bears Breaking Boundaries competition. In this project, we propose to provide solar power not for the whole hospital, but for specific operating rooms, targeting surgical lighting, and communications and diagnostic equipment. The solar equipment has been deployed in Kofan Gayan Municipal Hospital, in Zaria, rural northern Nigeria, and designed to be easily deployed by hospital staff on a daily basis as necessary. Since mobile coverage is inadequate in this area, we have also provided walkie talkies, which are charged during the day, and used for summoning the doctors on call during the night. In collaboration with TIERgroup.org, WECARE is raising money to pay for additional solar equipment, as well as headlamps for the midwives and doctors to use during obstetric procedures. Laura's study involves both a baseline evaluation to gather information on patient care prior to the intervention, as well as improvements after the introduction of these services, and monitoring of the hospital staff's ability to maintain the deployed equipment.
Ghana: Amita Telemedicine
The Ghana Consultation Network is a
distributed web-based social networking application designed for Ghanaian doctors in Ghana and in the United States to use
to consult with one another about patients. Modeled on the existing practice
of "curbside" consultation, the web site provides a directory service that
enables doctors to consult with professional groups, social contacts, referral
hospitals, and particular specialties. In addition, we have architected the
system with local servers in each of the main participating hospitals, enabling
doctors to interact with the application even when their Internet connection
may be faulty or slow. The servers then transparently synchronize with each other over the available Internet connection, propagating new cases and responses
throughout the network. This project has been done in collaboration with Rowena
Luk and Paul Aoki, and has also been incorporated as a non-profit in Canada.
[Other Publications]