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I-TECH

Category: Health Information Systems

I-TECH Supports More Than a Quarter of a Million Trainings

Post categories: Health Information Systems Health Systems Strengthening
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SEATTLE, Sept. 30, 2014 — The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) is pleased to announce an incredible milestone: to date, more than a quarter of a million people have been trained with the support of I-TECH and its partners. This total includes:

  • more than 100,000 nurses;
  • nearly 29,000 physicians; and
  • approximately 11,500 community-based health workers.

These health care workers are tracked using the Training System Monitoring and Reporting Tool (TrainSMART), an I-TECH-designed web-based training data collection system that allows users to accurately track data about health training programs, trainers, and trainees, to better evaluate training programs, plan new programs, and report activities to stakeholders.

“In many limited-resource countries, there aren’t enough health care workers to meet needs,” said Robert McLaughlin, Manager of Information Systems at I-TECH. “It’s critical to train new workers, and with the advent of new medicines, techniques, and technology, there is also the need for continuously updated skills and knowledge.

“Tracking which training is being offered, and where training is needed most, can be difficult,” he continued. “TrainSMART was designed as a solution to these challenges.”

TrainSMART tracks health care workers in nearly 72,000 facilities in more than 25 countries worldwide. Because TrainSMART is free, open-source software, it is appropriate for use in resource-limited settings and can be customized to meet specific needs.

For example, in 2012, at the request of the South Africa National Department of Health (NDoH), I-TECH developed a web-based application called Skills System Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SkillSMART), based on the same programming as TrainSMART. SkillSMART is now the NDoH’s database for monitoring and reporting on health care workers skills in South Africa; the database currently contains approximately 20,000 clinicians.

“I could not be more pleased to mark this quarter-million milestone,” said Dr. Ann Downer, Executive Director of I-TECH. “It’s a testament not only to the progress being made in health worker training worldwide, but also to I-TECH’s ability to create innovative and adaptable solutions to some of the most pressing health problems.”

The initial development of TrainSMART was funded by a grant administered by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

ABOUT I-TECH

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) is a center in the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health. I-TECH’s approximately 2,000 worldwide staff work with local ministries of health, universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), medical facilities, and other partners to support the development of a skilled health work force and well-organized national health delivery systems.

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I-TECH Presents at CUGH 2014

Post categories: eLearning/Distance Learning Haiti Health Information Systems Health Systems Strengthening HIV Care and Treatment Kenya Laboratory Systems Leadership & Management South Africa
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Optimized-CUGH 2014 (1)

I-TECH staff will head to Washington, D.C., this week to the Fifth Annual Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) Conference, which will take place at the Washington Hilton from May 10-12. More than 1,300 participants from 50 countries are expected to attend the conference, co-hosted by the George Washington University and Stanford University.

This year’s theme is “Universities 2.0: Advancing Global Health in the Post-MDG Era,” and I-TECH teams will present on forward-looking topics ranging from the implementation of electronic medical records to partnership with the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Confirmed speakers include President of the World Bank Jim Kim; former Head of UNAIDS and current Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Peter Piot; and Head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeff Sachs. Dr. King Holmes, I-TECH Principal Investigator and 2013 Gairdner Global Health Awardee, will also speak at CUGH’s Gairdner Lecture on May 12.

For those planning to attend the conference, don’t forget to check out the University of Washington Department of Global Health table — and to stop by the I-TECH presentations, listed below.

Kenya

  • Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Implementation at Scale in the Public Health Sector: Lessons Learned in Kenya

Haiti

  • Using an electronic medical record system to identify factors associated with attrition from the HIV antiretroviral therapy program at two hospitals in Haiti
  • Before and After the Earthquake: A Case Study of Attrition from the HIV Antiretroviral Therapy Program in Haiti

South Africa

  • Successes and challenges in liaising with PEPFAR partners and stakeholders in the TB/HIV Management Program
  • Evaluation of a comprehensive HIV prevention program in North West Province, South Africa: results from the pilot
  • Integrating research into program design: Conducting a situational analysis to inform comprehensive HIV prevention and care in North West Province, South Africa
  • Mystery patients: Training actors to serve as unannounced standardized patients to evaluate training outcomes for sexually transmitted infections in South Africa

Lab Leadership and Management

  • Certificate Program in Clinical and Public Health Laboratory Leadership and Management

Contact Anne Fox in Communications to see any of these completed posters.

About CUGH:

Founded by leading North American university global health programs, CUGH aims to:

  • Define the field and discipline of global health;
  • Standardize required curricula and competencies for global health;
  • Define criteria and conditions for student and faculty field placements in host institutions;
  • Provide coordination of projects and initiatives among and between resource-rich universities and less-developed nations and their institutions.

CUGH is dedicated to creating balance in resources and in the exchange of students and faculty between institutions in rich and poor countries, recognizing the importance of equal partnership between the academic institutions in developing nations and their resource-rich counterparts in the planning, implementation, management and impact evaluation of joint projects.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided the leadership and funding to plan this consortium. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a grant to help develop the organizational structure of CUGH in its first year of existence.

Ivoirian OpenELIS Software Developers Build Skills In Seattle

Post categories: Cote d'Ivoire Health Information Systems Health Systems Strengthening Human Resources for Health Laboratory Systems
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The weather has been rainy, and the midwinter days are short, but for two software developers from Côte D’Ivoire, four mid-winter weeks in Seattle offer a rare chance to develop skills under the close mentorship of University of Washington I-TECH experts.

DrKone
Dr Kone presents his capstone project to the Seattle OpenELIS team.

“There is no opportunity in Côte D’Ivoire to build software development skills like this,” said Dr Constant Kone on a recent afternoon as the grey Seattle rain pelted against the window of his borrowed office at I-TECH. His colleague Mr Kamalan Fourier, typing intently on his laptop across the table they share, nodded in agreement.

For several years, I-TECH has coordinated the implementation of the OpenELIS software in national public health laboratories in Côte D’Ivoire, an effort that is led by a highly skilled UW-based health informatics team. The open source laboratory informatics software was customized by the I-TECH team to match the workflow and local needs in Côte D’Ivoire.

But after the initial push to develop and install the software, there was a need for ongoing support, bug fixes, and additional features. “We get continual requests to add new features,” says Jen Antilla, a training specialist on the Seattle team, “for example to respond to new lab processes or build new reports that users need. And like any software, there will always be bugs to fix. We want to build the capacity to respond to those requests locally, in the labs where OpenELIS is running.”

Mr Kamalan Fourier
Mr Fourier presents his capstone project to the team.

Like all I-TECH programs, the Côte D’Ivoire deployment of Open ELIS is on a trajectory towards local ownership and sustainability, but that path is made more complicated by the lack of skilled software developers in Côte D’Ivoire. I-TECH began recruiting for local software developers in April 2012, and recognizing that most applicants would require additional training, the team started designing a custom training course to build the Open ELIS development skills of the new hires in Côte D’Ivoire.

As the first trainees, Dr Kone and Mr Fourier are in Seattle for four weeks, which is the intensive first phase of a planned nine month training program that will continue remotely after they return home.

Central to the training is a problem-based curriculum developed by Antilla and her colleagues, which moves the learners through a typical software development cycle: gathering requirements, designing the solution, developing it into the Open ELIS codebase, and testing it before implementation.

Paul Schwartz
Paul Schwartz reviews the work presented by his Ivoirian colleagues, and provides feedback.

“It gives them the opportunity to learn about the different facets of Open ELIS as well as the tools and process needed to build a new feature,” says Antilla. “And to do so under the direct guidance of a mentor who’s spending lots of face-to-face time with them. When they return to Côte D’Ivoire they will continue with similar exercises a few hours each week, under a remote mentorship of our team, for the next 8 months.”

In the next few months Open ELIS will be fully implemented at a new site in Côte D’Ivoire, the lab at the Institut Pasteur. For the first time there will be local developers on-site with the skills to solve problems locally for their colleagues, with ever-decreasing support from Seattle.

And the I-TECH team in Seattle looks forward to having skilled colleagues at the point of deployment, sharing of the load.

“There’s nothing quite like having the opportunity to build a personal relationship over 4 weeks together in Seattle,” said Paul Schwartz, the senior software engineer on the Seattle team. “I look forward to working shoulder to shoulder with them after they return. Even when those shoulders are half a world away in West Africa!”