Transcript Slide 1

Synthesis/Summary of Week’s
Discussion on Building
eHealth Capacity
Bill Hersh
(with copy and paste from others)
Given
• eHealth is essential for global health in the
21st century
• Technology must be appropriate and
contextual, which is not synonymous with
“old”
• Information is care
New (key) principles
• Informatics is essential to health and economic
development
• Need technology, human, and leadership capacity
• To develop capacity, need informatics leadership and
training and development of regional centers of
excellence
• Must make case to policy and political leaders and get
buy-in of health care professionals
• Need not only training, but training the trainer
• Need forum for expertise to assemble political,
business, health care, and technology leaders
• Must adhere to standards, best practices, and
avoidance of siloed systems
Other emerging ideas
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Informatics is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Capacity building
should be needs driven. A menu of common needs can be built up to assist
countries in their eHealth capacity building strategies.
There are different levels/types of informatics training required for different
roles/positions. A list of Informatics Profiles should be built up with their
corresponding competencies, training needs and resources available for the
training.
A National eHealth Assessment Methodology should be developed to allow
a country to work through their needs & profiles to come up with a viable
National eHealth Roadmap. Eventually this methodology could be
embodied in a tool, e.g., a National eHealth Wizard (NEW).
Leadership and advocacy are vital, and exposure to informatics concepts is
key to building the necessary support amongst policy makers, "influentials"
and change agents.
Regional Informatics Centres of Excellence could provide sustained
informatics activities to continue to drive eHealth developments.
Commissioned papers
• Educating the Health Informatics
Workforce in the Global South by Judy
Ozbolt, PhD, RN
• Determining Health Informatics Workforce
Needs in Developing Economies by
William Hersh et al.
• Developing Partnerships by William
Tierney et al.
Educating the Health Informatics
Workforce
• Environmental scan – already models of
success
– RAFT project in French-speaking African
countries
– 10x10 translation in Latin America
• We must learn from and build on known
successes
Determining Health Informatics
Workforce Needs
• Training is one of the bottlenecks for clinical
systems implementation
• Some topics mentioned were: competencies
required by the workforce, number of trained
people needed (which is related to the
degree of development of information
systems
• IMIA Working group on Education (WG1)
recommendations, issued in year 2000, are
being updated this year
Developing Partnerships
• Information is care
• Implementing eHealth → making (often
radical) changes in systems of health care
• Partners → enlightened self-interest
• Eyes on the prize → long-term partnerships
• Build local capacity → avoid dependence
• Publicize and build on successful programs,
methods, approaches, etc.
• Collaborate among countries, partnerships
• Be satisfied with small successes
Case studies
• Heard from diverse locations
– South Africa
– Turkey
– Peru
– Vietnam
– Brazil
Lessons from case studies
• Need national policy and leadership
• Must have adequate infrastructure and
awareness of eHealth
• “South” can become innovation leader due
to lack of legacy systems and ability to
leapfrog
2020
• An educational program (meta-curriculum)
– Scalable, adaptable/agile (to local conditions), affordable
• A set of educational resources
– Portal to resources
– A repository of resources
• A framework to develop local educational material (Wiki like
approach)
– Tool for the creation/adaptation/delivery of curricula
• A network /consortium
– Academic sites
– National/regional informatics associations (AMIA / IMIA, etc.)
– Private/public organizations
• A permanent set of discussed cases
– Including successes and failures (how the amino-acid have been
combined) to create useful educational material
20:20 Consortium
Financial & technical support
Local Experts
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Support for local experts could include
support for communities of practice
(national and regional organizations),
faculty (e.g salary support, professional
development, fellowships, grants), support
for institutions (libraries, infrastructure, etc)
Support for courses could include
resources, curriculae, technical
consultation, case studies and others
(AMIA, IMIA, universities, others)
1) Topic-specific short courses & modules (“Amino acids,“ “Bits and bytes”)
2) Introductory informatics courses for clinicians (similar to 10x10)
3) Higher-level informatics courses (Masters, PhD, etc)
Financing – proper business
model is essential
• Financing at a consortium level on a recurrent
basis
– Look also to Education, SciTech, Finance ministries
• To sponsor scholarships/fellowship (at an
individual or group level)
• For Faculty time/course material production and
updating to
– develop materials or curricula
– run courses
• To translate/localize the educational materials
Hierarchy of needs
Policy
Human Capital
Technology
Moving forward
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From silos to systems
Human as well as technology capacity
Learning from past experience and mistakes
Being evidence-driven
Building research into operations to improve
above
• Prioritizing local ownership and leadership,
empowered by expertise from international
leaders and organizations