EMR Goes Global: Bringing Technology To Developing Countries

Lately, I’ve been hearing quite a bit about global cancer care. I shouldn’t be surprised. The International Agency for Research on Cancer projects that by 2030 the incidence of all cancer cases will be 22.2 million. To learn more about the trend, I visited the Partners in Health website because they recently helped open a  new oncology hospital in Rwanda...

While on their website something caught my eye. Under What We Do, along with advocacy, research and service, was medical informatics. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about how PIH was using this growing component Health IT in the developing world.

So, the good folks at PIH arranged for me to speak with their Director of Medical Informatics Evan Waters. Waters began working for PIH in 2007 as the information systems manager for the Malawi project. Since his background was in civil engineering, he had to look at the big picture including infrastructure, water, and HIT/EMR. In Malawi,  he and his team implemented OpenMRS, an open-source EMR, to track HIV data.

Waters has been director of medical informatics since July and is now responsible for managing information systems requirements from PIH sites like Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi, and Lesotho. He works with a team of software developers to meet these requirements and collaborates with the clinical, research and monitoring, and evaluation teams to use EMR data to improve program management and patient care. Again, no small job!...