A dam near St. Gabriel’s Mission Hospital in Namitete, Malawi
A few weeks ago I packed my bags and moved to Malawi; I’ll be living here at least a year. In case you were wondering where I am, why I left my beloved Cascadia, or what I’m doing, I’m now the Field Director for FrontlineSMS:Medic. I co-founded this nonprofit with a few friends to help clinics use mobile phones to provide better care in under-served communities. I’m currently the only member of our team who will be working full-time for the coming year based out of East Africa. My work in Malawi is supported by a Compton Mentor Fellowship, a program which exists:
to promote the creativity and support the commitment of graduating seniors from participating schools as they move beyond academic preparation to focus on continuing “real world” application and contribution.
This fellowship has a few basic ingredients:
1. Select a cause you care about, and explain how serving this cause will enrich your life and the lives of others.
The Compton Foundation gets bright young people to work full-time on service projects right after they finish undergrad, that critical juncture where we are making career choices that will affect how happy and productive we are well into the future. A big part of my application was explaining why mHealth is right for me – why I find it so invigorating that a year in the field is sure to get me hooked on service work for the rest of my life. Medicine has made sense for a long time, however, until recently I thought dabbling in technology was just a hobby.
Then I decided I wanted to work in East Africa before starting medical school… what skills did I have to offer? I was honestly considering everything from teaching English to mopping floors when I realized that medicine needs geeks too! In a countless number of ways, having access to the information you need, when you need it, is essential to helping people be healthy. Somehow that was the difficult realization for me. Once I began looking at medical information problems in East Africa, cell phones seemed an obvious game changer and it was only a matter of time before I would discover FrontlineSMS and OpenMRS.
2. Find a mentor who you admire, who serves the same cause as you, and who would like to help you grow.
I’m very fortunate to be working with Ken Banks, founder and champion of the FrontlineSMS platform. Ken writes extensively about technology (especially mobile phones) and development from an anthropological perspective. My ethnographic work in Havana convinced me that participant observation reveals a certain subtlety that is essential to service outside of one’s homeland. If an estimate is an educated guess, I might say that ethnography is educated empathy. More important still, Ken is a great guy and an excellent communicator; he’s already been very helpful with my project.
3. Develop a plan of action to make full use of your intellectual resources and more than $35K from the Compton foundation over the course of one year.
My first plan of action was called MobilizeMRS. A far cry from what FrontlineSMS:Medic is doing today, but the basics were there – I wanted to integrate OpenMRS (the medical records system) with FrontlineSMS (for managing large groups of text messages). The plan had just enough spunk to become a finalist in the USAID sponsored Mobile Development Challenge. That small nod of encouragement helped put me in closer touch and eventually a working relationship with Josh Nesbit, and later Lucky Gunesekara and Nadim Mahmud, and the re-launch as FrontlineSMS:Medic is history (which you can read about at MobileHealthNews.com).
Fast-forward a few months – I now live in room #2 of a guest house at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. This rural mission hospital serves about 250,000 patients spread 100 miles in every direction. A year ago Josh Nesbit helped local staff train about 75 volunteer health workers to use FrontlineSMS to coordinate and provide better home-based care. I’ll be helping the same staff double the number of community health workers using phones in the field, train the community volunteers to provide more structured descriptions of their activities, and use PatientView to sort the data being sent to the hospital. At the same time, I will be helping the hospital transition from paper forms to a computer-based system for some of their medical records keeping. I’m also responsible for developing our Field Guide or Do It Yourself guide explaining our implementation model, and helping (via skype and email) clinics all over the place put this field guide to good use.
The eventual goal is to integrate the mobile phone program with some components of the electronic medical records system, probably beginning with the treatment program for persons with HIV/AIDS. After working in the clinic for a couple weeks, I couldn’t be more excited about the people I’m working with, and the project’s potential here.
This update was cross-posted to the FrontlineSMS:Medic team blog.
August 27th, 2009 Update: St Gabriel’s just published a new website with a good descriptions and excellent photographs of the hospital and community.
