Global Health - High Tech and High Touch

As Industrial Engineers in the healthcare arena we have the privilege to improve the healing experience of great number of people.  So I find it really exciting to learn about advances in global health, as the impact factor of those improvements can be so drastic in terms both of advances in quality of life and in the number of people affected.

We often view initiatives in global health as projects that take the best of "western" medicine and translate it to a population or region that has less resources than regions with "advanced" health systems.  However, two global health projects I encountered recently have gotten me to think about global health in a different light and see how we can take learnings back from global health projects and improve our "advanced" healthcare systems.

This is the first post in a series of two where I'll go over the projects that shifted my thinking.  The first was  a Ted Talk by Joel Selanikio about the process of capturing world health survey data and bringing in a high tech solution.

In his talk Joel talks about the arduous process of collecting data for global health purposes - almost all the data is collected by workers who go from town to town on foot and write the results down on paper.  This data then languishes on paper for years at a time till someone collects it goes over it again and does data entry into a computer, at which point it may be analyzed and may be become useful.  This data languishing period disturbed him and as a result he set out to clear this process of its waste.

His work focused mainly on coming up with solutions to help automate the collection and collation of global health project data.  Simple things like electronic forms on PDAs that emailed their data to a central hub helped cut down on the data's non-value add time, all the while not being too difficult for global health employees throughout the world to use and deploy.  Its a good lesson in technology implementation, going high tech can really improve system performance if implemented correctly.  The successful adoption of technology through out global health organizations relied on it being:

1. Design addressed Key Root Problem
2. Worked as Designed
3. Simple to use

These three points are really the crux of any technology implementation process.  You need to be able to define a problem, understand how the use of technology is going to solve that problem, all the while ensuring ease of use for all users of the system... easy, right?  Nope, definitely not an easy task - its a topic that I'm sure we'll delve into in the future.

Next week I'll dive into the concept of high touch with an awesome article from Dr. Atul Gawande.