eHealth and Information Systems Nigeria

On December 16, 2009 Roger Sideman wrote the following piece about our eHealth Nigeria project and GIIP.

Students forging a new frontier in global health

Health sciences major Evelyn Castle (’12) on her last day at the health clinic in Kaduna, Nigeria. The clinic’s new records room includes two computers.

Castle looking at a textbook with midwife students at the Kaduna clinic where she introduced Nigeria’s electronic medical records system.

Growing up, Evelyn Castle rarely journeyed beyond California’s borders. Foreign travel was a completely foreign concept.

So the Orange County native and second-year health sciences major at UC Santa Cruz didn’t waste any time on her first trip abroad. During a three-month-long project last summer at a health clinic in Nigeria–part of the UCSC Global Information Internship Program (GIIP)–Castle was instrumental in creating Nigeria’s first electronic medical records system.

Strictly speaking, the effort was part of a field study program, but it resembled more the work of a graduate student, or an international NGO, Castle’s advisors say.

That’s because the pilot project, with financial backing from heavyweights such as the Packard and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, has the potential to be replicated throughout sub-Saharan Africa–and, Castle hopes, it could ultimately revolutionize the way health information is managed, helping millions of women and children with very little extra required in terms of time, resources, and money.

Castle spent her first month hanging around the clinic in Kaduna, seeing how it was run and gaining people’s trust. After that, she hunted down several small, low-cost computers and spent her afternoons converting paper forms into computerized ones using the HTML design skills she learned in class at UCSC.

She taught data entry to the clinic staff, and was rewarded daily with large home-cooked meals and chauffeured rides back home in an ambulance to the Nigerian family she stayed with.

With computerized record keeping, medical histories are clearer and more reliable. Now, for example, if a sonogram shows that the position of a fetus puts the mother at risk during birth, there’s no chance that the information will be lost or illegible when she goes into labor.

Also with electronic records, the process of sending monthly reports to the government is cut from weeks to seconds. Before, filing monthly reports meant sifting through thousands of paper records to tally simple data required by the Ministry of Health.

“It was surprising to see that there was this need that we could fix with pretty simple technology,” said Castle, 21. “It just took a lot of improvisation.”

Campus gains in global health
The project is one example of a larger campus commitment to global health. Although dreams of establishing a school of public health have been put aside for now because of budget cuts, novel initiatives are taking hold: a new departmental home for health sciences, faculty collaboration with the brand new UC-wide Global Health Institute, innovative research investigating Mexico-California migrant health, and fresh resources for interdisciplinary work.

The students themselves initiate many of the most promising endeavors in the field of global health. GIIP, the program that sent Castle to Nigeria, for instance, is expanding its reach in Africa. The program lies at the intersection between student idealism and global activism.

As a longtime Nigeria expert who founded GIIP and the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at UCSC, professor Paul Lubeck supports students’ hunch that they can have an impact even before getting their college diplomas.

“We’re building on an activist tradition at UCSC where undergrads like Evelyn behave like grad students; they are responsible, well-trained, and highly motivated,” said Lubeck.

At UCSC, courses and programs have sprung up to provide the academic scaffolding to support students’ bold ideas. One of these, the Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies major and minor in the sociology department, graduated its first seniors last June.

Students in this program undertake three core courses. The first covers practical skills such as Web design, coupled with theories about how technology and social justice work together.

“A lot of people are excluded from society because they don’t have access to information with which to make better choices,” explained Adam Thompson, a computer specialist, UCSC graduate (information systems management, ’05) and program coordinator at GIIP, who worked closely with Castle to develop the medical records system.

The second course teaches grant writing, and the third consists of the field study.

The result is that students are importing entrepreneurship and optimism to a continent seriously lacking both, Lubeck said.

Applied learning feeds the classroom
Ideally, applied learning through service or entrepreneurship can feed back into the classroom. That’s exactly what is happening with the medical records project. A new sociology department course designed by a handful of students will focus on global health in Africa, and will be based largely on the work Castle did there.

“We’ve probably sent eight students to Africa so far–we have great depth now,” said Lubeck. “People know us, have seen what we do. We plan to build on that trust and past success that Evelyn has been able to mobilize.”

GIIP has also sent students to India, Central America, and Indonesia; about two-thirds of the internships are domestic.

Global health is an increasingly popular focus for students in the UC system in fields ranging from public health and medicine to engineering and environmental sciences. Student enrollment in global health education programs has doubled nationwide in the past three years alone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm and is filed under eHealth Nigeria Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.