Clinical Information systems as tools to improve quality of care in developing countries: examples from HIV and TB treatment programs
Speaker: Dr.Hamish Fraser , Partners in Health & Harvard Medical School
Date: December 6 2007
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: Stata 144
Host: Emma Brunskill, MIT
Contact: Emma Brunskill, emma@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ict4dev/The scale-up of HIV treatment in developing countries and the parallel
creation of large scale treatment programs for multi-drug resistant
tuberculosis (MDR-TB) require the creation of systems for chronic
disease management in places where short-term care, or no care at all,
is the tradition. Partners In Health (PIH), a health care non-profit
based in Boston, provides care to some of the poorest communities in
countries such as Haiti, Peru, Rwanda and Lesotho. PIH has pioneered the
treatment of HIV and MDR-TB by focusing both on building capacity in
local communities and bringing the best modern medications,
investigations and training to these impoverished environments.
One of the tools PIH has developed and deployed is a web-based
electronic medical record system to track the treatment of these
patients and their lab results and clinical progress. I will briefly
describe the PIH-EMR and discuss how we use it to reduce medical errors,
delays and oversights in treatment. I will also describe the evaluations
we have performed on the system in use, and discuss the critical need
for systems to reduce loss to follow-up in HIV treatment programs in
Africa.
Dr Fraser is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As the Director of Informatics and Telemedicine at Partners In Health he directs the development of web-based medical record systems and data analysis tools to support the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV in Peru, Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and the Philippines. The first system developed, the PIH-EMR, currently supports the management and monitoring of over 6500 patients in treatment for MDR-TB in Peru, and 1000 patients in the Philippines. Dr Fraser has also led the development of the HIV-EMR, which is used to support the treatment of HIV patients in rural Haiti. Both of these systems include data analysis tools, as well as components that track the current use of medication and predict future medication needs. The EMR systems used by PIH have been recently designed as part of an international collaboration to develop flexible, open source medical record systems in developing countries. The first version of this OpenMRS system, of which Dr Fraser is a co-founder, went live in February 2006 in Kenya and in August 2006 in Rwanda. OpenMRS is now also used to support the PIH projects in Lesotho, and will soon be rolled out to the new project in Malawi.
See other events that are part of
See other events happening in December 2007
