MHOP Welcomes Alex Harsha
-
Nov 23, 2009 Posted by Christopher Moynihan
Over the past six weeks, MHOP has welcomed several new members to our team. Two new Americans, Alex Harsha and Leona Rosenblum, have recently begun their year-long posts as Infotech and CHW Programs Coordinators. We have also welcomed two new Malian staff, Dramane Diarra (Community Coordinator) and Awa Outtarra (Programs Intern). We are excited to begin working with these enthusiastic and dedicated individuals, and would like to take the opportunity to introduce them and their projects to you. Arriving in mid-September, Alex Harsha is not quite a Malian rookie any longer, though she readily admits that the challenges of navigating life in Bamako still leave her feeling like a five year old on a regular basis! Regardless, we are confident that Alex and her project will be a great success. But let's just let her tell you about all that...
I ni ce and hello from Bamako! My name is Alex Harsha, and I am from New Ulm, Minnesota. I am a recent graduate of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where I studied international relations and bio-chemistry. It was an interesting, challenging (and odd) combination, and it allowed me to deepen my interest in global healthcare issues. While at Lewis & Clark, I became a member of an organization called FrontlineSMS:Medic , an organization that I believe will have a major impact on global health systems through its pioneering use of a simple, low-cost mobile technology program. In May, MHOP decided to pilot FrontlineSMS:Medic with their CHW program, and I jumped at the chance to join the team as Infotech Coordinator.
So what will I be doing, and why?
Few would deny that this is now a critical time in global health. While epidemics of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria continue to claim growing numbers of lives, the world faces a shortfall of 4.4 million health care workers. To close this health care gap, many clinics in developing areas now rely on community health workers (CHWs) to extend their reach. A CHW is a trained member of the local community who serves as a link between peripheral villages and central clinics, providing home based care and educational programs to those who might not otherwise access any medical care. Unfortunately, these community health workers are often as disconnected from the clinics as the communities they serve; CHWs must walk long distances to relay urgent messages or deliver paper health records, making both rapid emergency response and general program oversight costly and difficult.
FrontlineSMS:Medic seeks to address this problem by empowering CHWs to access and record patient data in a central automated medical records system via text message. The team is also working on geospatial mapping tools to allow clinics to visualize coverage or monitor disease outbreak and on integration of the software with a revolutionary cell-phone camera diagnostic tool called Celloscope. Over the next few years, CHWs will not only be able to record patient visits, send requests for information or emergency assistence, map disease burden but also provide automated diagnosis of malaria, tuberculosis or even HIV from the back of a cell phone. While internet access is often unavailable or prohibitively expensive in the world's poorest regions, mobile phone usage is now nearly universal and relatively cheap; by focusing on basic cell phones rather than smartphones (like your iPhone or Blackberry), FrontlineSMS:Medic is thus developing an accessible, sustainable, low-tech answer to a critical need.
A laptop connected to a cell phone turn into an SMS-message hub,
receiving and sorting patient data into medical recordsFrontlineSMS:Medic's of young entrepreneurs (the oldest a first-year med student at Stanford!) recently had the opportunity to pitch their ideas at a mobile technology conference in San Jose, and we were honored to receive $45,000 in seed funding for the software development this year. Money for implementation, however, must still be raised by each clinical partner -- a difficult prospect when these cash-strapped organizations already face huge resource barriers.
Few countries have fewer human resources for health than Mali. Here, there are only 0.6 health care workers (nurses, physicians, midwives and CHWs) for every 1000 people – one quarter the recommended number of health care workers, and one seventh of the world’s average. This shortfall compounds the major barriers to health care access in a country where nearly 95% of the urban population lives in slums and only 36% of the entire population live within 5 km of a healthcare center. In the face of these barriers, Mali’s population health indicators are staggeringly poor: 20% of children die before the age of five, and 90% of those deaths are attributable to preventable or treatable illnesses such as malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition, and respiratory infection.
For this reason, I was offered – and gladly accepted – the opportunity to spend the next year implementing a FrontlineSMS:Medic program with the Mali Health Organizing Project. When FrontlineSMS:Medic launched in Malawi in 2008, our program doubled the capacity of a 2,000 member tuberculosis CHW program, and saved the pilot clinic $3,000 in transportation fees and over 2,000 hours of staff time! I am confident that we can replicate and build upon those successes here at MHOP.
The program will pilot with MHOP's cadre of twelve CHWs trained in the prevention and identification of life threatening illnesses. These CHWs make bi-weekly visits to provide health education and care to over 600 children under the age of five, including early identification of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and respiratory infections. Since the beginning of this program in 2007, more than 2,000 people have been enrolled. With the CHW initiative aimed at reducing child mortality by 90%, this means nearly 150 children’s lives saved every year! The implementation of FrontlineSMS:Medic promises to increase this capacity to reach all 60,000 members of Sikorono by 2014, giving another 3,500 children life-saving education and treatment.
Mobile technology can dramatically improve CHW programs all over the world, and MHOP is very excited to be among the first to test it. Since arriving in Bamako, we have had some promising discussions with the health offices of USAID and Millenium Village Projects – both of whom will be watching our work closely. We will also participate in knowledge-sharing through partnerships with the Direction Regional du Sante, Doctors Without Borders, GrameenHealth, Partners in Health and the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative. What we do in Mali has the potential to impact health care delivery worldwide.
I am thrilled to begin implementing MHOP's (and Mali's) first mobile electronic medical records program, but we need your help. MHOP relies on the generosity of its donors and volunteers (me!) to make big projects like this happen. Thanks to the generous support of family and friends, I raised the $5,500 needed to support my work here and am hopeful that we will raise another $7,000 within the next few months to cover FrontlineSMS:Medic program costs.
Please consider a generous contribution to help us make this project a reality. A $240 donation will give 50 children access to better medical care through FrontlineSMS:Medic patient records, $475 will fund our first month of implementation, and $1,440 will pay for the program's text message fees for the first six months. And remember, if you donate online between November 10 and November 30 using the Global Giving program, your gift could be matched by up to 50 percent! Finally, I would like to encourage all of you to check out HopePhones , a phone donation campaign in partnership with FrontlineSMS:Medic. Go to the website to print out a pre-paid mailing label and donate your old phone today.
If you have any questions about FrontlineSMS:Medic or our Infotech Program here iat MHOP, please do not hesitate to get in touch. It is going to be an exciting, challenging year, and I am looking forward to sharing my experiences both here and on my personal blog . I do hope that you will continue to follow along, as your support makes all the difference.
Sending my best wishes from Bamako,
Alex Harsha Project Coordinator for the Mali Health Organizing Project FrontlineSMS:Medic
alexh@malihealth.org alex@medic.frontlinesms.com (011) +223 76 63 85 55