Tag Archive for 'civic engagement'

Goodbye Cascadia, Hello Malawi, Thanks Compton Foundation

Published on August 23, 2009 in Health. 1 Comment Tags: civic engagement, global.

st-gabriels-dam
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.

Speaking Engagement: Scotland Malawi Partnership Conference

Published on July 14, 2009 in Health. 0 Comments Tags: Blantyre, civic engagement, conference, Edinburgh, FrontlineSMS:Medic, global, global health, Ken Banks, Malawi, mHealth, Scotland, Scotland Malawi Partnership, Scottish government, slides, speaking engagement.

FrontlineSMS:Medic for Scotland Malawi Partnership 2009

View more slides from isaacholeman.

I presented these slides at the Scotland Malawi Partnership Conference at City Chambers in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009. If you are interested in the slides, particularly if you were able to attend the conference, I encourage you to contact me with follow up questions.

The short one-day conference was great. A few interesting tid bits I learned: More than half of all international health and development aid from the Scottish government goes to Malawi. Until Malawi began to build its first medical school just a few decades ago, most Malawian doctors were trained in St. Andrews. Blantyre (Malawi’s largest city) was named after Blantyre, Scotland, the birth-place of Dr. David Livingston. Dr. Livingston (of the oft’ quoted question “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”) was a Scottish Doctor who was the first European to explore much of East Africa, and his story is at the root of much of the long relationship between Scotland and Malawi. It was great being at a conference with so many people with extensive experience working in Malawi, and I particularly enjoyed meeting Maeghan Ray and the other conference organizers and speakers.

Since the conference I’ve been as busy as ever, meeting up with Ken Banks in Cambridge, visiting Dutch friends and host family that I hadn’t seen since I was an exchange student in the Netherlands (4 years ago!), and most recently re-launching the FrontlineSMS:Medic website.

Prizes for FrontlineSMS:Medic at Netsquared Conference!

Published on May 29, 2009 in Health and News. 0 Comments Tags: cell phone, cellular telephone, civic engagement, French American Charitable Trust, FrontlineSMS:Medic, global, mHealth, Microsoft, Mobile Development, N2Y4, netsquared, smsmedic.

Isaac Holeman (Me!), giving FrontlineSMS:Medic’s final pitch at the Netsquared conference, 2009.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Netsquared conference in 2008 with the featured project Squarepeg, and it was a wonderful experience. We didn’t take home a top cash prize that year, but I learned so much and met so many great people. So when I helped get FrontlineSMS:Medic started and we were in the process of meeting new people, continuing to explore our field, and looking for funding, I knew the opportunity to attend N2Y4 would be great. The community certainly didn’t disappoint. I feel like I am a slightly more thoughtful person for having had the pleasure of brain-storming, competing, laughing, eating, and drinking with all of you for this short whirlwind conference.

Our team also walked away from the conference with our first major organizational funding: the $25k top prize based on the Netsquared conference vote, the top $15K prize from the Microsoft Mobile Development Challenge, and a $5K social justice award from the French American Charitable Trust (FACT). Thank you, thank you, thank you, and THANK YOU!

For all of our friends who could not attend the conference and for those of you who attended and are (like us) still trying to piece together a flurry of ideas and experiences into a few memorable lessons, I’d like to share a few observations about why I think we were successful.

APT stands for Accesible Para Todos (Accessible For All in Spanish): Sasha from VozMob coined (I think) this tech acronym during his closing pitch, and I picked it up just minutes later during our closing pitch, using it to describe FrontlineSMS:Medic. What does APT mean for us? We’re working with a platform that is optimized for low-end and prevalent phones, that supports many roman and non-roman languages, and we’re trying to bring these tools to people who might not be able to access them without a little support.

Often the very DNA of an innovation (for example, look to our friends The Extraordinaries, also winners at this conference) requires a tool like a smart phone that just isn’t going to be accessible to everyone. That’s okay. But all of us can brainstorm about how to become more APT, and it was wonderful to have the Netsquared community affirm all the thought we’ve put into this topic.

We’re young and scrappy: I’m 23, and no one on our team is much older. On one hand, this means we know how to gird ourselves in caffeine and put the pedal to the metal 24/7 when we have a deadline. On the other hand, our project doesn’t have an MD, PhD, or M.A. at the helm. Many people would see that as a risk for such an ambitious project, and perhaps they would be right. The Netsquared voters, Microsoft, and FACT all decided to trust the core platform we work with, our successful pilot, and the passion with which we speak about our work rather than some of the traditional credentials of experience and expertise (initials like MD). Thank you for taking that risk, for being committed to meritocracy. We’re going to work tirelessly over the next year to prove your investment worthwhile. To that end… why don’t you help us succeed!

Here are a few ways you can help:

1) Go to hopephones.org, print out a pre-paid shipping label, and send us your old mobile phone so that we can repurpose it for global health. Consider contacting us to get a donation box at your work, school, or Church. If you blog or tweet, why not let the world know about our recycling campaign?

2) If you are a developer, designer, global health activist, philanthropist, or experienced entrepreneurial type, and are interested in contributing, we’d love to see how you can help. If you gave us a card or email at the conference, don’t worry, we’ll be in touch ;-)

Thank you once more friends and funders for an incredible conference.
- Isaac

This piece was re-posted at the FrontlineSMS:Medic blog and netsquared.org

Tag Archive for 'civic engagement'

Goodbye Cascadia, Hello Malawi, Thanks Compton Foundation

Speaking Engagement: Scotland Malawi Partnership Conference

Prizes for FrontlineSMS:Medic at Netsquared Conference!

Hello, I’m Isaac.

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